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POEMS BY THE EDITOR 


HESPERUS AND OTHER POEMS 
i vol. i2mo. 276 pages. 1.50 

THE VISION OF NIMROD 
1 vol. i2mo. 262 pages. 1.50 

THE VISION OF ESTHER 
1 vol. 121110. 315 pages. 1.50 


THE LOVE POEMS 


OF 


LOUIS BARNAVAL 


EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION 

BY 

CHARLES DE KAY 



NEW YORK 

D. APPLETON & CO. 


LONDON 

SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE & RIV1NGT0N 

1883 



2 ,. 


■f 6 




l 






Copyright 

1883 

By CHARLES de KAY 


All rights reserved 


Trow’s 

Printing and Bookbinding Company 
201-213 East Twelfth Street 
NEW YORK 


MARIA TERESA DE KERLEREC 


FORMERLY 

MARIA BARNAVAL 
OF 

TENSAS PARISH, LOUISIANA 




Few duties are more delicate and harder to fulfil than 
a literary trust. It is not easy to draw the line between 
things sacred to the individual and things the public 
must know ; and in the end one is tempted to print all 
there is, just as the manuscript was left. But even then 
there are gaps to be closed, the intention of the author 
to be guessed, order and sequence to be introduced in 
papers, for the arrangement of which only the faintest 
clews remain. 

But suppose personalities have to be protected ; sup- 
pose the story must be told and yet the actors screened 
from publicity ; suppose that she to whom the greater 
part refers be still alive, and yet her identity is to be 
jealously guarded ; suppose, finally, the materials are in 
the shape of verse. A new-comer need expect little 
grace at a time when the flood of books of verse 
known and unknown becomes a spring freshet. Yet it 
is always possible, viewing the large part which the un- 
expected has played in literature, that the posthumous 
work of a native singer will be read, partly from curi- 
osity, partly from patriotism, and that judicial minds 
will not be frightened, if they find the touch that of an 
amateur rather than a professional poet. It may be that 
some recognition will reward the editor for his pains, 


VII 


since a money return is not to be thought of. But there 
is always satisfaction in dealing with a work from which 
the money question is absent, and which appeals only 
to the true lover of art. In justice to the friend whose 
wishes are now being carried out, these are advised to 
read no further : Persons who have a natural indiffer- 
ence to verse, persons who affect to slight verse for fear 
of cheap ridicule, persons who pretend to love it because 
others do. The first waste time on what they can never 
hope to understand, the others are shams. 

His full name was Louis Barnaval de Kerlerec, but, for 
obvious reasons, he never used his last name. He had 
his bread to win in a hard school, and the foreign look 
of his name was enough to prejudice many business 
men against its owner. At one time, perhaps a trifle 
loftily, Louis Barnaval called himself a citizen of Louisi- 
ana, and when a mere lad he once fought to disrupt the 
Union. There met in him the strains of several French 
families founded at the beginning of the last century in 
that southern portion of New France which was to join 
hands with Canada and establish in the Mississippi Val- 
ley a great nation to the westward of the English, Dutch, 
and Swedish colonies of the seaboard — a nation which 
might furnish France with such magazines of men and 
supplies as Great Britain appeared to have founded for 
herself so well and so wisely on the Atlantic coast. 
Grudgingly supported, betrayed, and at last shamefully 
sold to Spain, they turned for allies to the most civilized 
tribes of natives, and although wars and bloody out- 
breaks occurred, their policy was, on the whole, tolerant 


VIII 


and humane. Anticipating Jean Jacques Rousseau, now 
and then one who felt keenly the indifference of the 
home authorities would take a native to wife, especially 
if she were beautiful and highborn, the alliance a source 
of strength, the tribe on a grade of civilization higher 
than is now thought possible to Indians. For to some 
of them there was a philosophical pleasure in mixing 
two races that had such opposite virtues and vices as the 
French and the Indians. 

Such a man was a certain M. Barnaval, one of whose 
ancestors had long before accompanied the Spanish con- 
querors to South America. Through him the mother of 
Louis Barnaval is said to have obtained a strong infusion 
of Natchez blood ; yet her portrait would not lead one to 
suppose so. There befell greater contrasts of penury and 
wealth to the planters of French and Spanish stock than 
to the hard-working colonists of the North. Climate, 
the enormous wealth of their plantations, Indian and 
negro slavery with all their enervating results, habits of 
feudal command and feudal lavishness, were so many 
hindrances to the handing down of fortunes. The ruin 
of families was hastened by the attraction of Europe. 
If Canada was depleted of men of mark and rank be- 
cause these returned to France as soon as they could, 
much more was Louisiana stripped of her natural lead- 
ers. Madrid used to beggar the conquerors of Mexico 
and Peru ; Paris devoured the princely estates of Louisi- 
ana. So that, in truth, it was no novelty in the family 
history when Louis Barnaval found his name and lands 
a drag rather than an aid in the struggle of life. Not a 


IX 


little disgusted, as he grew older, with the attitude of 
men who had done least in the civil war, and were now 
loudest in denouncing the victors, Louis decided not to 
sulk on his crippled plantation and try by sharp prac- 
tices to wring from the freedmen the advantages of the 
slave epoch, and more. 

In 1872 he left his mother at New Orleans, where at 
least she could see one or two old friends who dwelt ob- 
scure in the French quarter, and tried to get work in 
San Francisco. Was there some one in Tensas Parish, 
I have wondered, for whom he had formed an early at- 
tachment, unspoken then, never directly alluded to after- 
ward ? From the tenor of some regretful lines, I have 
sometimes believed there was. Perhaps because in the 
war he was a boy, perhaps because he had hit hard and 
been fairly hit in return, he alone of his surviving kinsfolk 
found himself generous toward the Yankees. And I have 
guessed that this heresy, detested by all good Southern 
women, had something to do with his silence regarding 
that boyish attachment, which, it must be confessed, 
may itself be a figment of the brain. The foolish fellow 
actually admired the solemn, newspaper-devouring 
Yankee who riddles all the Americas and Russia to 
boot with railroads, stamps on the measureless prairie 
till it laughs in harvests, fights to the death with his 
brother for an idea during exactly a presidential term, 
and then returns with equal sincerity and blundering 
success to the ways of peace ; the man who is a born 
mechanic and inventor, who puts his energy to subduing 
not the weaker among his neighbors, but the earth and the 


forces of nature. It may surprise a citizen of the North, 
unapt to cherish illusions regarding his fellow-country- 
men ; but this young offshoot of aristocrats, all the more 
intolerant for being provincial, passed several years em- 
ployed to no better purpose than in revolving schemes 
to make his way to New York. There was he to amass 
that fortune with which he might reach the highest point 
of modern civilization in its most practical, mechanical, 
unromantic phase. Forgive the day-dreams of a coun- 
try youth : New York was his earthly paradise! But 
in itself, or in its power to buy him personal comforts, 
wealth was nothing. The dreams of his young manhood 
never saw the millionnaire as too often he appears. No ; 
the latter was a man who cared little for himself, every- 
thing for his fellow-men and country. To the innocent 
fancy of Barnaval the stamp of patriotism was known by 
the liberal spirit which uses money, and the lever of 
man’s abject awe of money, in all ways that are benefi- 
cent, unselfish, highminded, wise. I remember one plan 
was to open the Southern States to the ideas of the 
North on education, reflecting little on the prejudices to 
be encountered ; he even dreamed of founding a daily 
paper to cement the bonds of North and South. Per- 
haps it was as well that he never became a rich man. 

Let me recall my friend so far as I am able without 
allowing the partiality natural in the case to overcolor the 
picture. He was tall and slender and had smaller hands 
and feet than some people like, because they suggest a 
want of manliness. He was very smooth-skinned, olive, 
low-voiced, and the most restfully indolent of men when 


XI 


no work was on hand. He hated pain and was nervously 
sensitive to hurts. Looking at his almond-shaped eyes 
and carefully arranged hair, his long well-trimmed nails, 
his dainty silk stockings and high-heeled slippers, you 
would mark him for a fop and a do-nothing. No one 
ever heard him discuss clothes or caught him looking in 
a glass. At once the manliest and the purest man I 
knew, he was capable of singular energy if there was 
need. He did not know what fear was. Yet to see him 
roll a cigarette was to lose at once all that frenzy for 
movement which is latent in the air of New York. One 
felt that there was still time enough in an ordinary life 
to achieve the most difficult things. To see the glow 
and sparkle of his oval face, to hear him say * ‘ when I 
am rich,” made one quite secure of the nearness of that 
questionable millennium and to believe in its beauty. 
When I first knew him, before despair had wrought lines 
into his face and sickness wasted the fine outlines of his 
figure, expression and voice would have given hope to 
the most skeptical. Never was there a man who believed 
more thoroughly in his own destiny. But it was without 
an atom of conceit or trace of self-consciousness. Until 
he met a rock which was indeed absent from the chart 
of life he had traced for his own guidance, until in his 
ignorance he dashed on it again and again instead of es- 
caping at once with as little hurt as possible, he was the 
most inspiring and yet resting comrade it has ever be- 
fallen me to know. His verses, however, prove that an 
unquiet spirit lay only half controlled under his will. 

Let me be just to the woman who was more immedi- 


XII 


ately the cause of his shipwreck. She had not been 
brought up as he. If a flirt, then she was one of the 
North American variety, supposed to mean and there- 
fore to do no harm. The young men her friends in early 
life took matters of love very calmly, not to say lightly, 
and were apt to refer to the passion in a tone of bur- 
lesque. She could hardly be expected to realize, at first, 
that here was a man of an entirely different physique, 
temperament, race, and bringing up, who regarded her 
not at all as a fiesh-and-blood girl, to be treated more 
respectfully and tenderly than a sister, but rather as a 
half-goddess like the queens of the Indian epics. It must 
have startled and amused her to be talked about as a 
fiery young Arab or a Crusader fresh from Palestine 
might speak of his mistress. And when Barnaval caught 
the American spirit a little awry and fell, as lovers will, to 
quarrelling, he went too far. His moods may well have 
been much more abrupt than any in her experience, and 
perhaps it was natural to resent them. And many of his 
poems must have far from conciliated or moved her. 
It was curious that one so gentle could write so fiercely. 
And yet — who knows how many of them ever reached 
her ears or eyes ? But after she had thoroughly revenged 
herself — how then ? Small use in moralizing. It must 
have been his fault as much as hers that an unlucky love 
affair was renewed when every reason existed on both 
sides why they should move sternly onward by the paths 
fate or their folly had marked out. Nay, his more than 
hers. Because on her side divorce was possible as a 
last resort, but by his church such an alliance was forbid. 


XIII 


But between male and female offender what saint shall 
decide ? 

How often have I sat and watched the fine line of his 
face against the window as he read me the first draft of 
a poem either on his lady-love or on some public theme, 
or, most curious of all, in relation to his own religion. 
I have omitted from this book almost all that do not be- 
long to his passion. The face reminded me — for the 
beautiful can remind of the grotesque — of profiles found 
in stone and stucco on ruins in Yucatan. Did that come 
from the touch of Indian blood assigned by tradition to 
a branch of the Barnavals ? Or from climate, assimilating 
the Gallic to the native type ? Or was it sheer imagina- 
tion ? Criticisms of his poems vexed him like a child. 
He could hardly bear to listen to objections against the 
use of idioms faintly Gallic ; but he was apt to change 
them afterward. Not that I cared to trouble him, for 
in my partial ears they sounded delightfully original. 
But since they are now to appear, I must obey him and 
cut many out, while I smooth some of the rougher lines 
into order as well as I can. Would that each reader, in- 
stead of noting with severity the errors I have made, 
might take a pencil and polish lines, rearrange stanzas, 
fix for himself the sequence of the poems as to his think- 
ing it seems best. Louis Barnaval is now in some region 
where we must suppose the petulance of an author yields 
to larger moods, whence he may be able to look into our 
hearts and see who has tried to be his friend this side of 
the grave. 

It was in one sense all my fault. He was here almost 


XIV 


friendless and quite alone, full of fresh will and energy, 
stern in his resolve to make a fortune. A warm nature 
such as his was sure to make friends soon, but a city 
boarding-house seldom offers the best acquaintances for 
an ambitious youth. It was hinted that if he were intro- 
duced to a few good families, not only would he avoid 
undesirable acquaintances, but among business men his 
chances to succeed would be better. Readers may de- 
cide whether there is anything in this theory. After 
some hesitation — for under a bold exterior he was really 
timid — he made his bow in several drawing-rooms, was 
liked, asked to dine, and presently was known in a small 
circle as a well-bred youth with no complications in the 
way of undesirable kinsfolk to interfere with an easy- 
going acquaintanceship. And certainly he was by na- 
ture a gentleman, handsome to boot, apparently ready 
for anything of a social nature that is bright and pleas- 
ant. There was no question of a cordial acceptance 
everywhere, except among families who inherit an old- 
fashioned intolerance of persons with dark complexions 
and foreign-sounding names, and an abhorrence of Cath- 
olics. Hazard had it that at one of the first gatherings 
to which he went he saw a daughter of such a family — 
people worthy, rich, pretentious, narrow as the horse- 
hair sofas that still linger in their sitting-rooms, and as 
hard. That she should relish the handsome phenome- 
non, if for no other reason than that he was in utter con- 
trast to the staid, unemotional young men she had seen 
before ; that he should mistake her open, if not really 
frank admiration for love, and that her family should at 


XV 


once take alarm and brand him with the terrible name 
of adventurer, are things too normal to be more than 
mentioned. Had he been enormously rich, there would 
have still existed a coldness toward him on account of 
his religion ; but he could have married her. He was, 
however, only by a metaphor the owner of the coat on 
his back the very night when his fate was sealed. It 
availed nothing that he had more wit, heart, and inbred 
courtesy than all the males of her family put together. 
They were of the majority. They approved King Co- 
phetua’s match in the story-book. They belonged to the 
class of people who, with a pietistic humbug not uncuri- 
ous, enjoy the smug parson who rises from an excellent 
breakfast to denounce in a pulpit hung with velvet and 
silk the greed and selfishness of worldlings. As they 
sit, fat, in high-priced pews, they are made sad and 
given the frame of mind proper to the Sabbath. But 
then they are reminded once more that they are rich. 
Let a man without his necktie accost them, let their 
pockets be assailed, let an alliance be suggested in which 
all material goods are not offered in barter for sons or 
daughters, and mark the change. All their money, 
social habit, philosophy, go for nothing ; the mask of 
the gentleman falls and shows the boor. 

If I am warm it is because at times this charming fel- 
low was their victim. He who seldom had mean thoughts 
did not suspect that others were mean-thoughted. He 
had on one side of his character a childlike openness to 
rebuffs that used to make me grind my teeth. Occasion- 
ally I could spring to the rescue and make the snob 


XVI 


wince with choice bits I had picked up in a desultory 
reading on the early history of the commonwealth. But 
for the most part I had to let Barnaval stand the pinch, 
or stab, or blow. His lady-love, be it said, never coun- 
tenanced such things ; she was the saving clause in the 
mean chapter of her family ; yet she had a keen tongue 
and a wit as sharp as a Sheffield blade. Louis soon felt 
its edge ; and I fear she enjoyed nothing so well as to 
torment him ; but when she had driven him from her a 
look would cross her face that explained his infatuation. 
Never was there a woman who could be more divinely 
compassionate. About her husband, whose tragic end 
completed the ruin of poor Barnaval’s health, it is diffi- 
cult to speak. He was not a brilliant man, but one who 
made many friends. He was a good husband, but 
liable to be hasty and impolitic. It was weak of him to 
try to escape the situation by a journey that gave rise to 
all sorts of comments. His return was so secret and the 
preparations for the duel so well guarded that to this 
day he is believed to have died suddenly abroad. And 
his death by the bullet of Louis was the greatest shock 
to the latter ; for it is certain that Barnaval aimed wide, 
and pointed his pistol at the ground. Luck would have 
it that the bullet struck a stone and glanced. Barnaval 
stood, badly wounded, but the other fell dead. 

After all, it was natural enough that Barnaval, as he 
brooded over his lot in a squalid room on Bleecker 
Street and felt his life ebbing away, should have been 
seized with a fixed idea, and exacted a promise that his 
verses should see the light. Perhaps he wished that she 


XVII 


to and about whom the greater number were written 
might see them in print. Or it may rather have been 
the desire that our united country, whose welfare had 
been dear to his dreams, should hold of a steadfast ad- 
mirer and critic some other trace besides the tombstone 
that stands white and raw in a quiet old village looking 
seaward across the Hempstead marshes. He wrote 
severe things, which I have not thought worth while to 
print, of his country and the “ commonplace yet singu- 
lar ” folk thereof. But his love for the woman who 
helped no little to bring him to his grave was not un- 
like that for his own land. He adored her but hated 
what he thought were her faults. And he was guileless 
enough to tell her so. But I confess that some of his 
verses seem to me unjust. His feeling likewise for the 
Church in which he was baptized, but not buried, was 
of a piece with this. He loved the Church of Rome. 
Yet the things he said of the Church and her adminis- 
trators were so severe that in our talks the Protestant 
was generally found her champion and defender. Sin- 
gular contradiction ! one exclaims. And yet — is it so 
singular ? Are not most of us doing something quite 
as fantastic and contradictory ? There is everything 
else to say about Louis himself, his wit, his character, 
his charm ; and there is great temptation to discuss his 
verses. But this introduction is already too long ; those 
who will care for his work at all will prefer to make their 
own criticisms and draft their own commentary ; a 
friend often harms by praising unduly. 

I see these two unlucky young people before me in 


XVIII 


memory as they stand side by side in a brilliantly lit ball- 
room with that indescribable consciousness of each other’s 
presence which betrays two persons who are deeply inter- 
ested the one in the other. What a handsome pair, what 
a contrast ! Her looks were such as make a division in 
the world ; one party delights in, the other depreciates 
them. Yet surely hers was a fascination seldom found. 
And fascinating she is still, although too much luxury 
and too many passions, perhaps also an undercurrent 
of remorse, have played havoc with her charms. Will 
these lines ever meet her eye as she wanders restlessly 
about Europe? And if they should, will they renew 
memories of youth and delights ; or merely wound ? Can 
there be one among the few friends of Barnaval that 
remember him who cherishes a harsh thought toward a 
woman so gifted and so unhappy ? Assuredly no. But 
so much cannot be said of her who was more than his 
friend, of an old lady whose photograph I have and 
prize, the solitary white-haired mother that lives on — 
who knows how? — in the quiet of the dilapidated barrack 
at New Orleans. She looks up no longer when she 
hears the jaunty step of the letter-carrier in the quad- 
rangle outside. The scion of an old French stock, it 
was before the heart of his mother that Barnaval poured 
the dregs of his misery. 


XIX 


LOUIS BARNAVAL 


PART I 




















































I 


When from the sacred porch you issue out, 
Hymn-book in hand, sober from thoughts devout, 
You look the reborn child of a Crusader, 

A vision dewy from the rare old time. 

I cannot ask your love. It is a crime. 

Within my breast upsprings a sharp upbraider 
For this my fault in seeking you to win, 

For folly, sin. 

I move beside you up the decorous street, 

With looks all fire our liquid glances meet, 

Then do I feel the strength to bring you blessing ; 
It cannot be that love so deep as mine 
Could fail to stay you like ethereal wine, 

That you could thrive without my soul’s caressing, 
Should not without me loathe each morning sun 
Wan, sad, undone. 

But when your feet upon your doorstep rest 
And no emotion heaves your virgin breast, 

The noiseless owl despair swoops down and covers 
My heart with midnight wings. ’Tis all in vain 
I call on memory for that glance again, 

Poor hare atremble in the press of lovers ! 

No use, no hope ; farewell for aye, too fair ! 

I do not dare. 


4 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 


ii 

Three times had nature silently replaced 
My every atom slowly, 

Nor ever to the fourth time was it come, 

When first these ingrate eyes of mine were graced 
With sight of one most holy 
That keeps unchallenged in my heart a home, 
Wherefrom shall never roam 
My wayward thoughts to any other woman, 

For in that hour an omen 
Touched me with shudd’ring finger-tips of dread 
While love and fear and wrath whirled through my luck- 
less head 


She swayed out slim among the flower-like girls, 
Artful, and yet most simple, 

Her broad white brow was shadowy with a frown, 
About her lips were little scornful curls, 
Unmirthful was the dimple 
Whence Cupid fast and wrathfully had flown, 

And her fine clinging gown 
’ All of her save one narrow slit must prison 
To trouble reason 

With dazzle cool, as when the lily’s bud 
Too weak is grown to compass beauty’s flood. 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 


5 


hi 

Her smile’s a flower that vernal joy possesses 
Most perfectly ; surcharged with dewy grace, 

It looks from out the still pool of her face, 

A lotus blowing in the water-cresses, 

An orchid that the bayou’s heart expresses, 

But O, more subtly ! at its bloom the trace 
Of self and worldliness can find no place 
In all her being. Have you seen the guesses 

At shapes the painter makes in leafy robing 
Of rich magnolias ? Then forego the chase 
O thoughts too bold and quit, O eyes, your probing 

For curves like patterns latent in a lace. 

Below her gown the small feet dip and dance 
As flower-like, nearly, as her smile and glance. 


IV 

When with other women stands 
She I love 

They should fly at her commands 
Since, above, 

Towering on her shapely throat 
A head of chieftain seems to float. 


6 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

When with maidens moves the maid 
Black of brows 

Quickly are they cast in shade, 

Fate endows 

Her with such a charm of ways 
As poets may not reach with praise. 


v 

Ask of voices in the twilight 
And of waves along the shore, 

Ask of pine-trees when they murmur 
Sound that’s music to the core — 
Peradventure they can tell 
111 or well . . . 

Ask the sunset o’er the mountain 
And the white cloud and the brown, 
Ask the larches in the gloaming 
If delight may wear a frown — 

For there lurks in sylvan dell 
Many a spell . . . 

Ask the woods ablaze at midnight 
And the northern wildfire dance, 
Ask the red moon o’er the ocean 
For a flame that haunts a glance — 
Marvels greater oft befell 
Monk in cell . . 


7 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

Ask the lines of lapsing water 
And the cypress in the wind, 

Ask the lovely curves of islands 
For a grace that heals the blind — 

Caught in whorls of little shells 
Beauty dwells . . . 

Ask of thrushes brown of pinion 
And the dayfly’s velvet wing, 

Ask the golden heart of pansies 
For the daintest living thing — 

Bees have tolled when branches swell 
Winter’s knell . . . 

Ask. And if all nature loves you 
Melodies, and clouds, and moon, 

Forms of beauty, woodland perfumes, 

Each and all shall serve as rune 

Whence the maiden’s name to spell 
I love well. 


VI 

Through the door I watch her candid 
Place within my world ; 
Lightly etched on cloud and banded 
Sky she stands from heaven landed 
Diamonded and pearled 
Where the earth-damp curled. 


8 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 

Wrapped in maiden thought, her golden 
Hair with chastity 
Bright, in youth and light enfolden, 
Pureness, candor, that embolden 
Coyer things than she : 

She is — just a tree ! 


Just a tree, whose buds are yellow 
With the hope of green 
And with warning of the mellow 
Autumn, contrast both and fellow, 
Fragrant woodland queen 
Filled with spices keen ! 


O my tree, alive with juices 

From earth’s bosom poured, 
Maiden tree that love induces, 

Vernal miracle that looses 

Leaves in black bark stored 
As from sheath a sword, 


Tree of swaying figure, utter 
Unto me your heart, 
Chant the secret rune I stutter 
In your windy tresses mutter 

Sounds with virgin art 
Near and yet apart ; 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 9 

Open, ope your buds and bending 

Down with leaf and branch, 

Be you me from baseness fending, 

Coolness in the world’s heat lending, 

Make me strong and staunch 
On life’s tide to launch ; 

Wisdom of the forest reach me 
Tell the lore of stars 

Conned through winter nights and preach me 
Truths undying, ay, and teach me 
Love that shatters bars, 

Love that laughs at scars. 

Do like Juno’s bird that hovers 
Passionate o’er his she 
Till the sun-wheel gently covers 
With a golden dusk the lovers 
One in ecstasy : 

Love me thus, O tree ! 


VII 

No maid to you compares, great heart, 

For savory sweetness and for cruel mirth, 

For marvellous tang ; 

None may your sense of breezy force impart, 
As when Diana spurns the leaf-strewn earth 
And bright bows twang 




io Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 

When the crisp winter moonbeams lead by night 
The clear cool orb that rises from the sea 
To freeze those lovers that disdain to flee. 

And yet how often on my startled sight 
You spring in alien forms, 

How many another woman you resemble ! 

Is it to curb my pride a tricksy spright 
With touch of you informs 
This and that dame where pretty dames assemble ? 
Perhaps for that I love you all the more : 

You are yourself, and yet include the host 
Of them whom when I sneer I love the most. 

I sneer, but God knows set by them great store. 
What arid streets, what houses of despair 
Without these ladies light and blithe of heart 
Who ponder garments like a mystic lore, 

Mix millinery with a daily prayer, 

Add outward graces to their inner art, 

And soothe men with a smooth and hidden might ! 
From her I love all others I infer : 

Women, I love you all, because of her. 

VIII 

Love is not blind, as foolish men suppose, 

But through the folded veils that close 

His eyes the quenchless rays sublime 

Pierce ; and love laughs at darkness, space and time. 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 


IX 

Two glorious suns were once your eyes. 
Too glorious ! wherefore mortalwise 
Two moons eclipsed them in blue skies ; 

But always where the splendor stood 
Mysterious golden shadows brood 
As sunbeams pierce the deepest wood. 

X 

In all the world who’s like to you, 

Who has that bearing of a noble, 

The great proud antelope eye, the true 

Firm look, the curved mouth fresh and mobile, 
Fit for a king of kings to woo 

Since all the earth has not its double ? 

Who has the lines from chin to shoon 
Of which I think not lest I swoon ? 

I love, hate, fear you all in one, 

Your scornful ways contract my heart 
But hardly has my wrath begun 

Your sweetness beams through every part ; 

No surer starteth up the sun 

Than followeth rapture on my smart. 

O, am I sad for you, or grateful, 

My compound strange of dear and hateful ? 


12 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

It were enough if you were dumb 
And left all language to your eyes. 

For ten poor lovers now, would come 
A thousand whom you might despise 
And yet be popular, as some 
Silent old hermits held for wise. 

But when those chiselled curvings straighten 
Your lovers fly as if from Satan. 


Savage, and child of modern days ; 

Woman, yet cruel ; rich, yet rude ; 
What mixture strange of barbarous clays 
With power of witchcraft you endued ? 
I seem to loathe and still must praise ; 

I try forgetting, yet must brood ; 

You are not civilized ! I rave : 

Your home is some dark hunter’s cave. 


XI 

I know not how there comes upon your features 
A shining light no other of God’s creatures 
Can show like you. About your eyebrows playing 
Its fine St. Elmo gleams, anon ’tis swaying 
Your tawny hair, and when you fix your glances 
From every part of face and figure dances 
The white strange light. 


13 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 

Now therefore do you wonder 
If sometimes, overawed, I make a blunder ? 

I and my foolishness at least are human, 

But you ... at times I know you are not woman. 


XII 

I love you passionately — beyond the sea ; 

Adore you tenderly — across the town ; 

Most fondly doat when sight can tell your frown 
From smiles across a garden’s verdancy ; 

But at your voice I grow so cold, so cold 

It seems an iceberg lies within my breast 

And at your hand’s touch there has through me rolled 

A secret chill and every vein’s oppressed . 

Alas, in love how false the saw 
Possession is nine-tenths the law. 


In dreams you are more savory than wine, 
Smoother than ebon, of a dulcet sound 
Beyond musicians who men’s care have drowned, 
Proud of yourself, more proud of being mine. 

But in the flesh some curst and crooked spite 
Bids you be pert and talk of random things, 

So all the reverence builded up by night 
Falls with a crash ; and then a demon sings 
Aha, in love how false the saw 
Possession is nine-tenths the law. 


H 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 


XIII 

No, no, you are not a flirt, 

’Tis a term for common people ; 

You are offish, fierce, and curt, 

Stiff and upright as a steeple. 

But, how comes it ? your repulses 
Have the virtue of a call, 

Your disdain the heart convulses 
That is cool when flatteries fall ! 

’Tis a way of Indian wont, 

O most artless, thoughtless maiden, 

Still to fly a hostile front 

While with guile their minds are laden : 
Thus disdainful timorous you 
Pierced me, helpless, while you flew. 


XIV 

There is a bird with handsome form and bright 
Quick darting eyes who flits all smiles of peace 
Through copses where the feathered warblers cease 
Their carols never save when hawks affright. 

It is a dainty bird, blue, gray and white 
And seems right glad in life’s abundant lease, 

In its own beauty and the cradling tree’s 
Low windy harping to the fair sunlight. 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

Anon it flutters where small twigs are stirred 
With fluffy balls of down ; there twitterers play 
Fearing no comer in such gentle guise ; 


Too long, alas, too confident they stay : 

A shriek is heard, a scattering in surprise, 

And one more songster feeds the butcher bird. 


XV 

Lovely is Kearsarge. Towering from the vale 
She calls with many a wavy plume of green ; 

At evening, clothed with purple shades are seen 
Her beauties massed along the sky-line pale ; 

But scarce her bosky foothills ye assail 
When steeps are found, thickets and sheer ravines 
Where tenderness was looked for at the scenes 
Of rude convulsion and of hate ye quail. 


O cruel love of mine, who seemed at distance 
So noble and so pure, so fair, wise, good, 

In me your charm could never meet resistance ; 


It stole one day into my very blood. 

Since when I must press on, though now I know 
Too late, too well, the weeds your gardens grow. 


1 6 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 


XVI 

Detestable base Anglo-Saxon mind, 

Filled full with love of lucre and the pride, 

The stupid prides which in those clowns reside 
Who still to art and courtesy are blind ! 

You do not see how worse than unrefined 
Is your pinch-featured, pale and trading race, 
Whose very jostling in their hard-won place 
Proclaims the world they’re not the genuine kind ! 

And then, on all that, you must strut 1 Poor child, 
It is not you the sneering world should blame. 

Have not your parents your young thoughts defiled 

With greed and vainness ? Was it not their aim 
To make you match with millions and to curl 
An ah, too ancient lip at love, sweet girl ? 


XVII 

How wise you are ! Yet not so wise 
As you suppose. Your wisdom shows 
In ways you least of all surmise, 

As thoughtless as a nodding rose, 

Like sweet or bad thought in some eyes ; 

And yet I love the vice that grows 
From that rare vase your boastful heart 
Like shapes in poisonous bogs apart. 


Love Poems of Loais Bar naval 


17 


XVIII 

\ 

And do you know you have a look 
Nor boastful now, nor shrewish either, 

A foolish far-off stare that took 

My eye when we would come together ? 
With scorn of you I fairly shook, 

Then forced the talk upon the weather ; 
The scowl grew deeper on your brow . . . 

My God, I love that fool’s look now ! 


XIX 

Divinely awkward : so the infant maid 
Plays with her doll and in her ignorance 
Is blithe and unafraid, 


And though her pranks and hoyden glee entrance, 
How soon — and down will tumble doll and child 
In midst her dance ! 


But pity springs that one so fair and wild, 

So foolish, yet who wields a trenchant blade 
By her most potent charm should be of peace be- 
guiled. 


1 8 Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 

xx 

Pity — it is the life and death of love ! 

It stirs affection, gliding from above 
Like the forerunner drops upon the sand ; 

Pity — a weapon good when men will wive ; 
Ay, seize it then ! but see that, love alive, 

Far it is banned ! 

Let lovers feeling it confess and shrive ; 

For with it mean contempt goes hand in hand. 


XXI 

Strangest of all — I love you so 
Meseems no other loved before ! 

And yet, at times, I do not know. . . . 

Why cannot I be blind ? adore 
Your sweet perfections and bestow 

No thought on things that grieve me sore ? 
Hush, if I doubt my love for you 
Nothing is real, nothing is true. 

Ferhaps my love for you is all 
Of my own self a reflex action, 

And when by night I groan and call 
Your name, it is a mere abstraction. 

An echo sounding from a wall 

That fancy clothes with some attraction. 
So, after all is said and done, 

I the old circle round have run. 


19 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

In days Arcadian lucky men 

Perceived there lurked a gamesome maiden 
Behind each boulder, down the glen 
The air with answering peals was laden ; 
But later on came science ; then 

Half-wisdom sought all hope to deaden. 
Arcadia beckons. Still I sue. 

Arcadia is not, wanting you. 


My love’s an echo, you a wall 

Stiff mortised, moveless, harsh, unyielding. 

And yet there was a trumpet call 

That broke walls once. So fair a building 
Must have fair dwellers, and the fall 

Lies most with him the trumpet wielding. 

Shout out ! no more let there be echoes cheat- 
ing ! 

Open your gates ; loves must be meeting. 


XXII 

Have you a soul ? These many months I strive 
To meet its traces. 

Have you a brain ? These many weeks I drive 
My shafts in divers places, 

Yet never strike the honeycomb which sweetens all the 
hive. 


20 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

Your body lives. And long have I been thrall 
To touch and color, 

But neither lips, nor hands, O soft, O small ! 

Can still my dolor, 

Since without soul the fairest shape I do not prize at all. 

XXIII 

My own lost girl, my little one, 

Your faults are washed off in the sea 

Of drowning grief like sailors blown 
From tossing masts far, far to lee. 

A hero seems each shipmate gone 
To comrades left in agony ; 

So do your faults appear far dearer 

Than virtues to the lonely steerer. 

Come back, come back ! Alas ! too late ; 

The poet says, what pen has written 

No more shall be erased. The plate 
Will show the mark by acids bitten. 

All after-woe is vain ; grim fate 

Laughs at the wri things of the smitten. 

Ah, if you care to know, I writhe : 

Pray God, that your dear heart be blithe ! 

I never loved till now. Not you, 

No one till now has filled my heart, 

And this I know is surely true 

Because not all of the sophist’s art 


21 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

Can make your foibles vices. New 

Bright conquering virtues crowd each part. 
I am not dazzled, but my wide eyes see 
Through the rare shadows of variety. 


XXIV 

Ah, you are right. ’Tis not for me to raise 
My darkling thoughts to such a height as thine. 
Here in the caverns of this dismal mine 
I’ll toil my span and end my weary days. 

But who, alas, will fill my vacant place ? 

Who will, as I would, for your sake resign 
Ambition, rest, and comfort ? Who will twine 
With roses on your path each dusty place ? 

True love within this world is oh, so rare ! 
Suppose you wed, and he, though not unkind, 
Be merely careless ! That were a despair 

Too great for me : to think that laws can bind 
You to a living corpse will surely give 
Such grief to me I care no more to live. 


Let me regard the future with an eye 
That blinks at nothing. In the well-dressed crowd 
Whom shall you notice, who shall be allowed 
To win where others found scant courtesy ? 


22 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

The hard man who is humble till the day 
That makes you his ? he whose philosophy 
Is clipped from books ? who thinks it right to pray 
Because free-thinking’s vulgar ? who can ply 

A coachman’s whip above a lumbering carriage ? 

O, you are far too diamond-bright a soul 
To waste your brilliance in a model marriage. 

I know, I know your hungry thoughts will roll 

Back to the day when from a smiling face 

Three words came forth that robbed my life of grace. 

XXV 

Without your presence can I ever rest ? 

And yet you snap your fingers at my pain 
Nor care that having dragged me from my way 
You thrust me back to horror. I confessed 
My care at once ; have you no faint, faint strain 
Of sympathy ? You passed the other day 
Lordly, indifferent in your coach. The trick 
Is cheap and yet it cut me to the quick. 

XXVI 

I hate your friends and kindred ; as against the swamp 
The cardinal flower delights the soul with awe 
And scarlet tanagers the hemlock grove illume 
And glow-flies light by night an incandescent lamp 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 23 

And storms have globes of flame that oft the sailor 
saw, 

Your splendor juts sublime against the neighboring 
gloom. 

So from the mud of Tiber, buried deep and moldering 
long, 

The marbles rise yet beautiful in spite of greed and 
wrong. 


XXVII 

Ah childhood, and the tales that sink 
Below the tide of childish minds ! 

A touch, taste, smell, and to the brink 
Ye rise ; by ones, by twos the rinds, 
The filmy rinds of memory shrink, 

Its kernel-core the past unwinds : 
And eyes of infancy retrace 
A coppery but how loving face ! 


1 When Louis dreams * (I hear her prate) 

‘ One soul within his bosom stays 
Another feathery soul, elate, 

On wings of fire will thread the ways 
Of airy distance while its mate 

Keeps watch at home ; where’er it strays 
An instantaneous sympathy 
Between your double soul shall be.’ 


24 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

By yellow floods O yellow nurse, 

Sole remnant of a vanished race, 

Your lesson I to-night rehearse 
At midnight, waking in my place, 

With gladness dumb, yet grieved the worse 
At gladness gone, since by the grace 
Of some good god, I ventured far 
Beneath my twin-soul’s double star . . . 


Abroad, abroad ! Its wings are hushed 
As wings of snowy birds of night 
When to the stem of pine tree crushed 
The snowbird cheeps in eaves of white 
And shades dark green. Abroad it rushed. 
My frolic soul, for it had sight 
Of something, half-way, which was known 
As mine at once, yet not mine own. 


Then back by telegraph whose thread 
Is fine beyond the wit of man 
In me abroad the joy that bred 
To me at home with tidings ran, 

So glad, so wild ! ‘ Beware,’ we said, 

4 Such joys have sorrows in their ban ! 
Yet, yet with future ills have done, 

Are we not one, forever one ? ’ 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 


25 


XXVIII 

Think not to grasp, or here, or there, or yon 
The happiness a strong self-centre craves ; 

The oozy deep is full of moveless graves 
Of them that false hope threw its rays upon. 

Think not, beyond the lovely lines that gird 
Your breath from air, breath that is faint perfume 
Wafted from shrines all frankincensed and myrrhed, 
The whole wide world for happiness has room. 

Within that ivory ring shall you discover 
Love that gives all and asks naught of a lover. 

’Tis self-abasement fills the perfect sphere 

And glads the world. Already, woman dear, 

As comrade watches come to tick in tune, 

The same thoughts move us, be it dawn or noon. 


XXIX 

Then give me friendship and content therewith 
Let me march on across the dreary waste, 
Your river-water let me merely taste 
And I’ll believe the springs of love a myth 
No man shall find ; for soon the tender pith 
Of love in me shall be so firmly cased 
In harshest bark, you’ll swear I have displaced 
Whatever love calls kin, or passion kith. 


26 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 

But seek no other friend. I would be yours 
Yet not yours either. Let us marriage make 
Such as no others in the world can join : 


Will you the spirit’s vows upon you take 
To be my friend, the while that life endures, 
A wife — and yet no maiden right resign ? 


XXX 

For your perfections not a word have I, 
Lameness infects my glib and fearless tongue, 
Less lovely others it has boldly sung, 

But you — you dash its wonted bravery. 
Delightful ? lovely ? charming ? such words fly 
Blunted like arrows back ; I cannot fashion 
One arrowy phrase of my o’ermastering passion 
That even will flutter to your maiden sky. 


You cast such witchcraft suddenly from your eyes 
That like the hero of the Gaelic story 
My knees give way and, careless of all glory, 

I seek through prayers to reach your paradise. 

I love you so, sinews are all unstrung 

And womanish tears into my eyes have sprung. 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 


27 


XXXI 


When fury seizes you, amazement fills 
With awe mine eyes ; 

What you despise 

Is dulness less than wonder wide that spills 
From the small box of brain — 
The stress and strain 
Of too great loveliness my spirit kills. 


Know that the passion that will most deform 
Illumes you quite 
With such a light 

As when suns harp with golden hands the storm 
And myriad fingers tear 
The streaked air 

Till shivering men their hearts in glory warm. 


But I’m the tempest grown ah, wondrous kind 
Who was most rash 
With you to clash, 

Yet roused a joy I never thought to find. 

The sun at midday kills 
But ever fills 

With peace the morning and the evening wind. 


28 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 


XXXII 

From yours far different are my native shores ; 

We toil not so incessant, look more kind, 

In the long afternoon with neighbors joined 
At friendly talk by wide plantation doors 
We lounge at ease ; perhaps a jocund mind 
Flings out a challenge and impromptu pours 
A burst of song, whereon a newly coined 
And quickly following answer victory scores. 

I sing to you. Alas ! no answers come. 

I sigh. Ah, woe ! your mockery wounds my soul. 

I tell my love. But either you are dumb 

Or stare at me as at a brain-sick fool. 

I am a fool, not to have loved so true, 

But to keep showing that I still love you. 

XXXIII 

Gusts keen as steel that sweep the Mexique plains, 
Remorseless heats that break the quivering ground, 
Its life-juice never from a coarse plant drains 
That hoards a cistern in its stem profound : 

Beneath its bristly coat there never wanes 
The store of liquid, crystal-clear and sound : 

O love of mine, when I am gray and lean 
Still shall my heart with love of you be green. 


29 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

Perhaps while I am cold with rage 
Calling you cruel, rude and proud, 

You from a corner of the stage 
Observe me slyly in the crowd, 

Trying my actual self to gauge 

From out wild words and laughter loud ; 
You scorn me frivolous and groan 
For one who sees, knows you alone. 

And so I am ; frivolity 

With me is like the breath of life ; 
Brooding is bad for them that see 
Poison, a bullet, the red knife ; 

So while itself the breast can free 

From loads of desperate sin and strife, 

Is it not fair to blind the reason 
And flutter one short blissful season ? 

But then I have your portrait here, 

Not the mere lines that change and waver. 
But something deeper, far more dear, 

That part of you which fadeth never — 
Your mind, your soul, the essence clear 
Of your fresh harshness, all the savor 
And pure elixir of grace, to which 
Beauty is water from the ditch. 

’Tis autumn. See, the silver-birch 
Leans tenderly through leaves of gold. 

So fresh and delicate ! no smirch 
Nor taint of that fair trunk is told ; 


30 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

' Most like it, angel forms the church 

Drew to lure heathen tow’rd the fold — 

A tree too fair for mortal eyes 
But fit, like you, for Paradise. 


xxxiv 

Can there be others, I reflect, like thee 
Lonely and proud ? 

Are the maids jostled by the careless crowd 
Sad equally ? 

Know they your pain of looking for a friend 

In vain, though many to the post pretend ? 

■ 

Then what avail self-chiding and contempt 
If after all 

None is so strong with look and conquering call 
Thee to pre-empt ? 

Why unto thee is not their love-song sung ? 

Cold is their look, too ready is their tongue. 

Men call thee fair, and quick of wit, and cold. 

Yes, there it lies : 

If they but near, how bird-like dost thou rise 
Far from their hold ! 

Why art thou wroth when men or smile or frown ? 

Why, than be touched, wouldst thou the rather drown ? 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 


3i 


XXXV 

Yet see, the birch that’s bodiced white and rare 
Holding a sky-blue parasol in place 
Above her robe embroidered all with lace 
Drives not the sun, her lover, to despair. 

For how, so fair, can she become unfair 

And blot the heaven that stands within her face 
With pouting clouds, or do her soul disgrace 
Through listlessness and pride’s unseeing stare ? 

The sweet wise shapely birch tree has for hate 
No room below her fragrant savory bark ; 

She murmurs early and she whispers late 

Of lifelong friendship ; but when falls the spark 
That lights her death, she foots the flaming gate 
Glad as a Hindoo’s widow toward the dark. 

XXXVI 

How right it seemed my virago to find 

Among the band of sisters, cousins, brothers, 

And know that she can be as mild as kind, 

Supporting patiently the whims of others, 

And, to her personal comfort blind, 

Their fun applauds, their wrangling smothers. 
Through that rough rind which does her dear heart wrong 
Cropped forth the trait that I had loved, how long ! 


32 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 


XXXVII 

I’ve called you hard as granite roots of hills ; 

I’ve chid you void of female sympathies ; 
I’ve wept the cold observance of my ills ; 


But, as the Pole that evermore will freeze 
Trembles at hint of summer from the South 
When suddenly puffs a warm and spring-like breeze. 


So did I tremble when your firm-set mouth 
Softened to-day, your clear contemptuous eyes 
Grown deep and warm with O, what godlike routh ! 


Ay ; for a god must pity, not despise. 

Ah, well I marked that great and marvellous change. 
It passed as o’er an ice-cold lake that lies 


Par down in purple dale swift shadows range. 

When suddenly all from cold hard careless gay, 
Turns sombre, tender, melting, deep and strange . . 


So might a soul yearn for its robe of clay. 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 


33 


XXXVIII 

They call you cold. Yet icicles 
Are frore and still there runs a rune 
Whereby one from their core compels 
The heat of noon. 


Pure, golden-eyed ! . . . A nation quaint 

Who worships her that hearts unlocks 
Carves with such golden eyes the saint 
From crystal blocks. 


Fastidious ! . . . But shall nobles give 

Their inmost thought to man and clown 
Who have no souls ? Enough, to live 
Without your frown. 


Too wise ! . The humble should be glad 

That subtly woven thoughts are read 
And weighed on scales of good and bad 
In that fair head. 

But politic ! . . . O childish race, 

Near betters restless, hating bars ; 

For ye, with angels face to face, 

Would flout the stars ! 


2 


34 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 


xxxix 

Happy he who once has stood 
By a treasure of the wood ; 

While the radiance of his prize 
Rains on unbelieving eyes 
Lo, where he would lightly pass 
Laughs the stargrass in the grass ! 
Stargrass gazes with an eye 
That heaven can conjure, hell defy ; 
With the straight and startled look 
Of the faw# that sips the brook ; 
With glances pure distilled and clear 
As angel-smile or Venus-tear : 

No flower of haughty gardens vies 
With stargrass fresh from Paradise. 


XL 

Ah moments of a softer look, 

Ah hours that flew all unaware, 

Ah graceful skyswung hawks that took 
The eye with beauty’s curve in air, 

Ah happy grass within our nook, 

Say, were you pressed by shape more rare ? 
Your voice that day, my own dear maid, 

Sang like the wind through a leafy glade. 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval . 35 


XLI 


Psyche the maid had heard of love nor knew 
Of love by sight. She slept beneath a tree. 

This laughed one night in blossoms, and there blew 
A breeze and strewed her from the breast to 
knee. 


And whether love came up from earth or fell 
With shower of petals, who can say of lightning 
Which way it strikes ? There needed none to tell 
Psyche of love at Orient’s earliest brightening. 


Ah Nature, wide alembic, boundless main 

Of marvellous acts, what secrets can you show ! 
Where all was rough and motionless — a rain 

Of gossamer blooms ! where love was not, you 
grow 


Buds of sweet feeling, timid joys like petal 
Of tender gold ! For lo, my rods outcast 
Blow flowers in row as flies of Psyche settle 

And with mere wayside mud their saffron wings con- 
trast ! 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 


6 


XLII 

I’m a worm at the feet of you, love, 

In the dust of the highway extended ; 

I lie mid the cinders and move 

Just enough to say life is not ended. 

You must come like a cool dash of rain, 

You must gather me lightly in leaves, 

You must nurse me through sickness and pain, 
While your palm a soft net for me weaves ; 
Then sweetened, refreshed and remade, 

When cast is my wrinkled disguise, 

On my pinions of sapphire and jade 
You shall float, 

You shall float through the land of surprise. 


XLIII 

O loveliness of earth, O draughts delicious 
Of odors, airs and views ! 

What buoyant sense of youth along the limbs 
With you beside me on the grass, capricious 
As the quick morning dews 

Which fly before the thrush has ceased his hymns, 
Before the eastern rims 
Of little ponds are gladdened by the sun ! 
Starveling, what have I done — 

That one day brings these heaps of high delight 
And your face, glowing with a heavenly might ? 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 


37 


XLIV 

Gray is the dawn, a spiteful wind 
Rattles the blind, 

Dull is the morn, but from the room 
Gone is the gloom, 

Sad is the day, yet O what light 

Bloomed here all night ! 

Sandal, myrrh and frankincense 
Their souls dispense, 

Eiderdown and Persic wrap 
My body lap, 

Harp and organ symphonies 

Outhymn the breeze. 

For all night long I lay in trance 

And watched them dance, 

The lids and glances in whose eyes 
My future lies, 

The face that hides in smiles or tears 
What hopes, what fears ! 

XLV 

Seldom falls her mute caress, 
Rarely come her smiles, 

Then it is that summers bless 
Hyperborean isles ; 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 

For when she yields it seemeth so 
Vivid tufts of heather show 
Through the melting snow. 

Who shall dare to call her stern, 

Churlish or unfair ? 

Lavas under glaciers burn 
Hid from common air ; 

For when she melts it comes to mind 
Lovers hitherto were blind, 

Loves were never kind. 

XLVI 

Watch the curves of a flag shaken free, 

The gait of a steed at a gallop, 

The laugh of the dawn on the sea, 

The pride of a high-bosomed shallop ; 

Or think over joy brimming days, 

Mind the scent of the grape when it’s blooming, 
Or the booming 

Of bees in the tali tasselled maize — 

So rare, so delicious, 

Warm, fragrant, capricious 
The palm is of her that loves no man but me ! 

Think of gayety sound to the heart, 

Of tenderness, pity for sorrow, 

Of goodness not cloying but tart, 

Of fear and yet faith for the morrow ; 


39 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

Take deftness and candor and truth, 

With of wilfulness more than a scruple, 
Quadruple 

The whole with a glorified youth — 

So winsome and sprightful, 
Forever delightful 

The palm is of her that loves no man but me ! 


XLVII 

Will she come to the trysting, my Indian girl, 

Girl of the rich dark face ? 

Shall the dead leaves rise from the grave and whirl 
And warm themselves at her trace ? 

Shall the maple boughs where crimson has been 
With her cheeks like sunsets blaze ? 

’Twixt silvery birch and hemlock green 
Shall I fathom her deep true gaze ? 

My Indian girl of the serious turn, 

Laughing but seldom, and then 

With a clear low laughter the pebbly burn 
Learns of the thrush in the glen . . . 

Shall I see her ? The morning is gray with fog 
And down from the mist-wrapped hill 

A raven croaks, in the cloudy bog 
The deer lie breathless still. 


40 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

But hist, a fox has sped through the grove, 
Hushed are the partridge drums : 

With her quick free step, her eyes all love, 
My Indian, my conqueror comes. 


XLVIII 

At last alone, alone where myriads throng, 

Nor heed us, mighty caravanserais ! 

Alone to catch the song 
That ocean sings and sighs 

Where the long breaker lifts and bows farewell to sunlit 
skies ! 


Delight to run like beachbirds barefoot down 
The hard wet sand, and tear with childish glee 
The ocean’s foam-fringed gown, 

And from the sad land flee 

As lovers plunge from coral strands into the cool south 
sea ! 


And side by side to cleave the waves asunder, 

And dive like fish and meet in brief embrace 
In the dim twilight under, 

A strange immortal grace 

Thrown on your form, as we were dead and meeting 
face to face. 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 


4i 


XLIX 

How came I here ? Vault, pillar, groin. 
Tall windows deep with hues that join 
With sunset hues ; 

The peace, the bowed heads in the pews, 
Ay, Latin words I used to use 
My lips recoin ! 

Well, here I am. They stand bereft 
Of priest, the altar I was deft 
To serve of old, 

The spangles that I took for gold . 
Sweet awe, fair peace of lamb in fold 
Are ye still left ? 

Yes, here I sit. But see, a door 
Flies open, and across the floor 
And up the stair 

A crisp-haired boy ! The blithesome air, 
The ease of him, the joyous care 
That once I wore ! 

Yes, there I move and to and fro, 

Saucy and handsome, whistling low 
To vex the priest, 

I wave my spark until increased 
From two to twenty at the least 
The tapers glow. 


4 2 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

Image from out old memories caught, 

What strange abstraction could have brought 
Me to the scene ? 

Perhaps all loving is of kin : 

Has new with love that once has been 
Alliance sought ? 

My love for one has turned me mild 
And changed me back till when, a child, 

I worshipped God. 

What miry ways since then I trod . 

O stony paths I still must plod 
My soul to assoil ! 


L 

What restful calm descends upon the man 
Who knows his purpose ! From a mountain crest 
O’er graven pathways, streams that gnaw the wold, 
He smiles wide-eyed across the unfolded plain 
Far tow’rd the glories on the outmost verge 
Where hurrying Phoebus beckons from his car : 
Yonder’s the way ! Look, the untroubled goal ! 

That holy calm is mine, O double soul, 

With me now knit in love beyond all jar — 

Thee have I found, my hope in thee I merge ; 
Warmed by thy breath no gale my heart shall drain 


43 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 

Soothed by thy palm I dare the dangerous wold, 
And while with rapture still expands my breast 
Clear through thine eyes rises the cosmic plan ! 

But thou mine own, the prospect calmly scan ; 
Fear not the future ; on my shoulder rest 
Thy smooth soft cheek ; then tenderly yet bold 
On this strong arm linking thy beauty’s chain 
March forth with me through life’s incessant surge. 
Nor faint though mists should haply blot a star, 
Though overhead the thunder-drum will roll. 

Say not that all must be a happy whole 
Of light that shadows never dare to mar. 

With carols alternate the solemn dirge : 

Sweet mouth and eyes, O sweetest soul and brain, 
The earth hath metals wholesomer than gold. 

Be comforted, have faith, and make me blessed 
As Eve once loved and blessed the primal man. 


LI 

Over the mountain beyond the gray cloud 
’Tis blue, blue, blue, 

My love she is dainty, capricious and proud 
But true, true, true. 

Who can compel her ? 

How shall I tell her 


44 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

That I, only I, know her sweetness in full, 

I who can quaff 
The wine of her laugh 

And love her the dearer for calling me dull ? 

Over the ocean below the gray cloud 
’Tis dark, dark, dark. 

My love has allured me and nothing allowed 
But cark, cark, cark. 

How can I win her ? 

O, I shall spin her 

A song that will set her heart throbbing for me. 
If once it shall melt 
She soon will have felt 

My own keeping time like the moon on the sea. 
LII 

When thou art near me thou’rt so far away 
The gulf that Lazarus viewed, what time the spirit 
Of tortured Dives found a voice to clear it, 

Seems a short gap compared with my dismay. 

But when thou’rt gone, myself doth thee inherit, 

I hardly know whose semblance I display : 

Is’t thou, or I ? It must be I, for nay 
Is not upon its lips — and yet I fear it ! 

Am I two persons ? no, not fairly one. 

A mote I am still beaten hither-thither, 

An air-tossed leaf, a veering aimless feather, 


45 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 

A leafless tree, a thrush that cannot sing, 

A pile half-built, an eagle with one wing, 

A sea sans shore, a world without a sun. 


Be thou my sun, and rise on every morn 
To find a worshipper like him who knows 
Darkness for months among the Polar snows 
And hurries, trembling, and with gloom outworn, 
To that high hill where first the pallor grows 
Before the blush of sunrise. Have no scorn 
Though we of thy sweet graces are forlorn, 

Nor hoard thy love. She lives who love bestows. 

Yes, like the sun pour down a generous flood 
Of love unselfish, yes, though unrequited, 

Still be thou grand enough to stir the blood 

Of torpid women listening to thy name. 

So shall the man whose pleading thou hast slighted 
Kindle with reverence at thy noble name. 


LIU 

I ask not if my dog be foul or fair 
So he be loving, nor that next my skin 
The nearest wrap shall be of Persian wear 
If warm it keep the ruddy room within. 


46 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

Who says to fire : Spring you from cedarn cores ? 
To water : Were the skies you troubled blue ? 

To earth : Of old did weeds arise in you ? 

To airs : Blew ye from soft Sargasso shores ? 

Then why should you draw parallels of praise 
’Twixt me and men, as though, were I far less, 

A fainter love or none my days would bless, 

Or each alone would foot our separate ways ? 

Love not because of heart, or brain, or eye, 

But all and absolute, sans how, sans why. 


LIV 

A borderland of glory lies 

Betwixt our waking and our sleep, 
There rocks precipitously rise, 

Prairies in awful grandeur sweep, 
There black is inkier than midnight, 
Whiteness is more than white. 

From thither I but now am come, 

From walking in a fairy yard ; 

Mine ears still catch the golden hum 
Of wings that scatter myrrhs and nard, 
Mine eyes are ecstasied with gleams 
That shine too real for dreams. 


4 7 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 

Yes, you were there, more beautiful, 

If such may be, than now you are ; 

O, but my heart was bursting full 

Of thanks that sneer nor glance could mar ; 
Your face was strange ; I durst not tell 
Words that I knew how well ! 


The electric glamour of the scene, 
The sky, the heart-subduing hue 
Of vistas where the purplish green 
Of far-off seas annealed the view 
To one delicious perfect whole — 
They cured mine every dole. 


Still, still there crept a spiteful thought 
About the wing-borne heart of bliss, 

Of days that other lessons taught, 

When all the fay’s land seemed amiss, 
And you, ah changed ! were no more mine 
Than unchanged I was thine. 


Which vision’s true ? That borderland 
Lets nothing dull, unquickened be. 

Or fair or foul, each thought must stand 
Instinct with life, a slave, or free 
As bubbles rise along the storm — 

Hot, cold — but not lukewarm ! 


48 Love Poems of Louis Bar?zaval 


LV 

What would I give to pour my soul 
Out at the perfect gateway yours ! 

Yet this is like the heavenly Pole 

And that the guide-star which endures 
The torment round and round to roll, 
Yearning to clasp the star that lures : 
Yet should the pole-star lightly choose 
To ask — the guide-star would refuse. 

Look, as we ride the bushroad through 
The saucy branches strike your lips ; 
They ask not any leave of you 

As each across your red cheek slips ; 
And I, ah it is all too true, 

I envy every leaf that clips. 

But look you, I’m no bush, not even 
A satyr to insult your heaven. 

Respect — ay, that’s the little word 
Your sex must cry, but really they 
Want only that the sound be heard, 

And from their earliest conscious day 
They long to be by bold men stirred 
Out from a prudent stated way : 

Who takes them at their word’s a fool, 
Will lose his suit or live a tool. 


49 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

But I would rather lose my own 
Than desecrate her with a touch ! 

When, a clear answering flame, you’re blown 
My way, and eyes are lit with such 
Responsive light that you shall own 

Love has took wings and thrown his crutch ; 
Then, glorious woman, I’ll be found 
The fieriest lover love e’er crowned. 

Long since I would have made a stand, 
Abjured you quite, stopped every visit, 

Save that as often as I planned 

A manly course, one look exquisite, 

One sad long parting gaze unmanned 
My fixt resolve. Alas, what is it 
That shakes your heart ? Is pride the spell 
That fills you, deep and dangerous as hell ? 

LVI 

How have you learned to tell the moment sure 
When I your harshness can no more endure ? 
For just as I have reached that dreadful goal 
The which a poet passing only stayed 
Until his hand a final sonnet made, 

Then slew himself and damned his simple soul, 
You turn so gentle, kind, delicious, warm, 
Dreamy and tender that the silly storm 
Slinks off abashed and I must hang my head— 
And yet no word of yielding have you said. 

3 


50 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 


LVII 

The grinning menial at your door 
Enjoys, I know, my woful face. 
His sanctimonious cold grimace 
Makes the denial far more sore 0 


Hired to lie, he finds it sweet 
To cause a wretched lover pain 
And dares to show of his disdain 
A glimpse beneath the ancient cheat. 

Like master, man. No figs are found 
On thistles. A responsive mind 
From sight of harsh and outer rind 
Judges the poorness of the ground. 

And you, you rest within at ease 
Reading a novel languidly ; 

Perhaps you care enough to see 
A lover on your doorstep freeze. 

But when you watch him stalk away, 
Striving to keep his features smart, 

Is there no voice within your heart 
That warns — he too may have his day ? 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 


LVIII 

Like should consort with like. The moth 
That stirs brown wings from weed to weed, 

Should he complain of slighted troth 
When gilded day-flies pay no heed ? 

They live their season, brief but gay, 

Wise in their tribe. And so you’re right, 

O woman with a face like day 

Still haunted by the thought of night, 

For you a rich and leisured swain 

Should pass his years in plans to please . 

O day-fly, just is your disdain 

Whose home is in the tops of trees ! 


LIX 

Could it be I whose gait is really lame ? 

How often storms and darksome days are harsh 
Because the spirit flounders in a marsh 
Of thoughts unruly bred of sin and shame ! 

But the firm spirit, clean and void of blame, 
Finds no day hopeless, no storm undelightful, 
No bog of fronds and flowrets unrequiteful, 

Sees the good thing under the odious name. 


5 2 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

What if the heart of this corporeal mesh, 

This mesh whereof each fibre, drop of blood, 

Yearns to you, grasps you — what if that had warning 

How all the time the actual bearings stood ? 

What if it felt the eternal sneer, the scorning 
Of souls that wrestle hard with amorous flesh ? 


LX 

Perhaps again it is your fault. Too free 
With looks, you are too frugal with yourself ; 

Born of a sordid race, you cannot see 
The landscape save through glasses gilt with pelf. 
Perhaps my nature knows that you have never 
Advanced to meet it with true modesty : 

Coyness ill-timed, a false and misplaced glee 
Conjoin to damp our faith and life-ways sever. 

Perhaps — perhaps ... I can no more ; God send 
The bolt that me and these vain rhymes shall end ! 


LXI 

Let me confess my folly here 
As side by side we drive along 
The woody road and bend to hear 
The thrush’s mellow even-song ! 


53 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 

O many a time your name most dear 
Did I with words of insult wrong, 
Thinking it would my vengeance sate 
To use coarse epithets of hate. 

But all was vain : I love you so 
That merely leaning thus, aware 
That you are you, fine tremors glow 
From feet to gently stirring hair. 
Careless your presence you bestow 
And give more joy than I can bear. 
Why, truly, should you grant such favor 
To me, lack lustre, void of savor ? 


LXII 

Now when you speak I turn away 
My reeling vision from your face ; 

Delights too strong, too deep a play, 

Things too luxurious me enlace. 

With loveliness would you me slay ? 

Let me enjoy each separate grace 
And I shall thrive by high endeavor 
So bravely as to live forever. 

And pass my days where I can hear 

Your voice, but never a word you’re saying, 
That so, not overwhelmed by sheer 
Delight at sight of features playing, 


54 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 

I live with prudence year by year, 

My stint of love with caution weighing — 
Bah, I should break within an hour 
My way to you through wall and tower ! 

LXIII 

Night, night, my joy conceal, 

Go, go thou prying day, 

Or lips that felt the seal 
The sacred print betray. 

The seal and royal stamp — 

0 passport to what treasure ! 

One swift, God-given pressure — 

It shineth like a lamp. 

Come night !— but ah, by night 

1 may not sleep for thinking, 

Were day swung through, I might 

Love’s nectar now be drinking. 

Stay day ! for I must brood 
Deep folded in my mantle 
On joys of love that scant all 
The joys of thought, of food, 

Of music, of ambition, 

Of air and earth and sea ; 

These reach not in addition 
What some one gave to me. 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 


55 


LXIV 


List : 

Science folk have lit upon 
Many a neat invention, 

They can measure in the sun 
Heat rays in suspension, 

Draw an echo’s curve 
And its length observe, 
Weigh a human nerve 
And the cell-pounds mention. 

Whist : 

Did they at cigar’s tip note 
In their grave convention, 
Smoky cases Cupid wrote 
In a love-declension, 

Dotting down the throb 
Quiver, start and sob ? 
Perish all the mob 
Worthless Love’s attention ! 


LXV 


I care not if they think you fair, or you 
Think yourself fair, it makes no odds to me ; 
There’s a quintessence far more rare to see 
Behind the eyes that now are brown, now blue ; 


56 Love P oe 7 ns of Louis Bar naval 

Some call your figure good : I do not know ; 

Tis well enough ; but there’s a little droop 
In sloping shoulders that doth charm me so, 

I am amazed all women do not stoop. 

Is your foot small ? I swear I cannot tell, 

I only see when that sweet frame’s in motion 
An awkward grace, a billowy fall and swell 
As when a yacht bounds through the summering ocean. 
Wit was the beacon first my vision drew, 

But O, your goodness — as I gazed it grew. 

LXVI 

When I enigmas of the world propound 
And ask of cloudlets floating light as air 
High o’er the murk what things they have in care, 

Or of the storm what happiness it found, 

Or question of its joy the low sea-sound ; 

Then at the hour across my listening hair, 

Heard in the tempest, breathed o’er ocean’s lair, 
Stealeth an answer from the skyey round : 

Three ways I love you : first with all my soul 
That rays on yours like twin-stars void of fault ; 

And next with mind that sways your reason’s pole 

As pairing hawks touch wing in heaven’s vault ; 
Lastly with body that would mix with yours 
As capes are clasped of seas while earth endures. 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 


57 


LXVII 

Frail birds that feel too weak of wing 
To wander past the stormy sea 
To feathery backs will catch and cling 
But cheer their hosts with songs of glee. 

So I to pinions of your faith 

Entrust my soul, nor doubt at all : 

O strong heart, bear me clear of scaith 
From windy blow, from watery fall. 


LXVIII 

Love me slowly, do not haste 

Lest the dye should quickly fade ! 

Kiss with slow and savory taste, 

All the wonder fairly weighed. 

What if hurry bring disdain, 

Love too ardent make you loth. 

Sugared phrases cloy your brain, 
Fervent thinking jade your troth ? 

Hate me, rather, now and then, 
Frown against me like the night, 

I will brave the moment’s pain 
For the later long delight. 

3 * 


58 Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 

Love me deeply, mellow, slow, 

All your life in mine compressed, 
So our bodies one shall grow 
And our bones together rest. 


LXIX 

Ere the rain was really there, 

Silent maid, 

Did you feel a touch of care 

Like to fingers laid 
Gently on your hair, 

Shadows o’er your spirits fall and thrills your breast in- 
vade ? 

Treetops in a sudden qualm 
Shake and pause, 

Wavelets leap though winds are calm, 

Clouds of golden gauze 
Whirl though still a balm 

As of airs of Paradise enfolds the fields and shaws. 

Day-flies, beasts or wild or tame, 

Birds of song 

Restless grow, ay, blooms that flame 
All the roads along 
Feel at heart the same . . . 

Can the sadness of great gladness agitate the throng ? 


59 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

Ere your face is really there, 

Silent maid, 

I know one o’er whom despair 

Shakes his coward blade, 

Feeling Gorgons crouch and stare 
Through his soul and lives in pain until his eyes are 
laid 

On the large-lid velvet eyes . . . 

O, the rest 

Of your voice, and O, the prize 

In your look confessed . 

O, earth’s gladness, as she lies 
Listening to the rain that falls in music on her breast ! 


LXX 

Rest deep and living steeps and warms and folds 
This wayward soul, when at the last we cling 
Shoulder to shoulder, when the vast bat’s wing 
Of night, unfurling from the east, withholds 
Sight of the sun, burying his greens and golds 
So deep the hope fails that the morn will bring 
The monarch back ; — ah, though you call me king 
My confidence bears stamp of other moulds. 

My creed is that I love you, and whate’er 
You did or do, indifferent, good or bad, 

Weighs not upon my balances a hair 


60 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

Nor shall it make me for a moment sad. 

One and yet two — O, what a mystery’s there 
To wake the dullest, make the gloomiest glad ] 


O restless throng, massed on the shovel prow 
That eats the moonlit reaches of the river, 

Ye feel them too, those mysteries that quiver 
Through deeps of tenderness on high, below, 
Shooting in stars, glancing through eyes that glow 
Yellow, red, green among the barks, and shiver 
The North with splendors from a boundless giver 
And seam the dark with lamps that come and go. 

For hushed are hoof-stamp, babble and the sharp 
Jangle of bells, and songs uncouth are still ; 
O’erhead resounds the vast ^Eolian harp 

Built for the god of storms by human will, 

The Bridge — whose twin colossi with their warp 
Frame for the dawn’s white feet a curving sill. 


Behold the dawn, like you white robed and young 

Whose kiss divine has made me too a god 

Fed with ambrosia such as earthly clod 

Ne’er perfected, but an essential wrung 

From flowers intangible that long have sprung 

In human hearts, nor tasting of the sod 

But of that field by mortal passions trod 

Where kindness blooms beyond the scope of tongue. 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 61 

Your kiss is cool and seems an icy arrow 
To push regretfully my bosom through, 

Yet lurks behind it warmth as of the marrow 

Of soft-furred things — ah, like the dawn are you 
Cool-fingered one ! and see, through cloudy barrow 
Heaped to entomb the sun that hero stalk in view ! 


LXXI 

Yes, I’m turned musician, with your favor! 
Clumsy fingers ripple like the grass, 

Eyes that read not crotchet, clef or quaver 
Lightly down the page fantastic pass. 

I, who could not tune a foolish zither, 

Tour a choir of music organ-toned ; 

Lovely sounds are darting hither-thither, 
Harmony o’er discord sits enthroned. 

Ask me not the miracle that wrought it 
Else you be a lover most discreet ! 

Stoop your ear ; I whisper how I caught it 
In one lesson all too briefly sweet. 

Fancy me two-bodied in the gloaming, 

From my arms bud other, tender twain, 

From my knees two feet, O shapely! roaming 
On the pedal lay their velvet strain. 


6 2 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

Keep my secret. Thus I turned musician, 
Felt a glorious anguish sweep my heart 
While two souls in heavenly-glad contrition 
Took with heavenly choristers their part. 


LXXII 

The mind of man, how lonely, weak and proud \ 
Nor comrade lightly nor is peer allowed ; 
Boastful, self-centred, by its proper aid 
Fain to exist from swaddling band to shroud ! 


Who was that old philosopher who bade 
His thought push wings and circle unafraid 
Down to the first of things, the runes to read 
Of men and women ere that sex was made ? 


Man then was woman ; woman, man ; the meed 
Of selfish coldness was to life decreed, 

Wrapped in their double nature, in their womb 
Each bare the offspring of his private seed. 


So may we erst within the spirit’s home 
Have formed one soul, whose halves, O joyful doo 
Though parted long by forces past our ken 
With songs remembrant face to face have come. 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

The fixed stars not always fixt remain 
But burst in satellites with paths in chain, 
Another aeon, and those wand’rers turn 
To meet and passionate to embrace again. 

So we are met, and if too warm I burn, 

It is that souls are weary that adjourn 
Their bliss so long, that, sad and incomplete, 
To merge themselves together they must yearn. 


LXXIII 

Forgive, forgive the barbarous desert chief 
That so assailed the glories of your shrine, 

Scaled the fair walls that hedged the fane divine 
And roughly entered where beyond belief 
Lovely and godlike, fresh as new May-wine, 
Virginal as Diana in relief 
Against a Grecian frieze, that form of thine 
Awed the bold robber to a shame fast thief! 

It was my ignorance, goddess wise and kind, 
That brought me here, but now for grace I kneel 
Before your altars with a contrite spirit ; 

I needs must joy that boldness made me blind, 
O, mark my brow with that delicious seal, 

And grant I may your champion’s place inherit ! 


64 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 


LXXIV 

I never loved before, so tell me, lover, 

If I am treading love’s old pathway over 

All lovers trod ? When foils were swiftly whirring 

And through your veins the hot red blood was stirring 

Did the faint-grown but always biding image 

Of true love brighter grow as warmed the scrimmage, 

And while the bygone lost chivalric spirit 

Could for a space its antique sway inherit 

Did she to your exalted mind appear 

Still wiser, wittier, still more fair and dear ? 

LXXV 

Within my heart all forms of love 

Have met and kissed you lip and brow. 

At first my love began to rove 
Chaste as a sister’s pulses flow. 

Next like a doting uncle’s care 
My warm affection you waylaid ; 

Soon, father-like, I stood to stare 
Upon my glad and winsome maid. 

Ah then ! ask torrents why they fell, 

Demand of hurricanes the cause 

That zephyrs suddenly will swell 

To gales that break the bound of laws. 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 65 

There was no brother in my heart, 

No loyal comrade pressed your hand, 

A while I took the foeman’s part 

For madness touched me with his wand. 

But lo ! the storm is broke. I yearn 
With mother’s, father’s, husband’s love, 

Deep as the sea that holds no burn, 

High as the stars that never move. 


LXXVI 

Even as the birds that haunt our twilight sky 

With sickle wings flecked twice in shapes of moon 
Through sheets of rain their flight undaunted ply 
Brave in a strength that comes they know not why, 
Nor at the lightning bolt will blench or swoon, 

And as through deeper night they carve their way, 
By faith upborne upon their pinions fine, 

So have I learned even to the morning’s gray 
On love’s pyed wings my heavy heart to stay 
Pillowed on gales that blow from realms divine. 

LXXVII 

Cool blows the wind, it cannot rob 
My lips of warmth upon them sealed ; 

And bright the stars, they do not throb 
Like glances erst to me revealed ; 


66 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

And clouds are smooth, but O, the clear 
Expanse of bosom half descried ! 

And dear, white gentians, but more dear 
The arms where curves and dimples hide. 


To find a friend, what miracle is harder? 

But if she meet you half-way in your ardor ! 

The half-moon dreams, she does not swim 
Like eyes that half with passion close. 

The owlet nestles on the limb 

No softer than two cheeks of rose. 
Luscious are nectarines they say 

The Far West bears, I know a mouth 
That sweeter tastes, is fresh alway, 

That warms the north and cools the south. 


Say, do you know how long we’ve been asunder ? 
An hour — a day — or twenty months, I wonder ? 


LXXVIII 

A moist warm air so tense and still 
The creak of oarlock mounts the hill ; 
The moon, a lamp a star-flame holding ; 
A violet moondog both enfolding ; 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 67 

Nor cricket’s chirp, nor bay of dog, 

Nor shout, nor blast through stealing fog; 

In long lines brooding trees that pray 
Or seem to grope a blindling way — 

Hark, how ethereal yearns and grieves 
The owlet, here before the leaves ! 


O disembodied voice, O shade, 

O harp TEolian sweetly made 
In part of moonbeam, part of mist 
By fingers of Aurora kissed, 

Against the black pearl of the sky 
Invisible you softly fly 
And to the March night moan of wrong, 
How day detests you and your song, 

How birds are foes and spring deceives — 
Poor owlet, here before the leaves ! 


The damp from earth my body chills 

And through my thought your quavering thrills 

A terror vague. The spectral sky — 

The trees uncanny — and that cry . 

I know all now : the phrases made — 

The grave — and who therein is laid 0 
’Tis my voice cracks the stony charm ; 

’Tis my soul mourning haste and harm ! 

O spring that smiles and omens weaves, 

Am I not come before the leaves ? 


68 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 


LXXIX 

What have I done to feel the fiend despair, 

Black as the jaws of overhanging storm ? 

In vain I reason, his abhorrent stare 
On me is bent and all the pulses warm 
Freeze, and my lips mutter a useless prayer. 

Ay, ’tis the hour when scornful memories swarm 
Within the mind and jeer my very ruing 
Since what I did not I would now be doing. 

For friendship is a trust. Then what have I 

To show for that most precious gem I borrowed ? 
The star that fell to me from eastern sky 

Was held most dear ; I joyed with it and sorrowed. 
But was that all ? Does she more wisely ply 
Her brain or body ? Is her soul-field furrowed 
Deeper to hold a rich and sacred grain ? 

Through me does she more kind or wise remain ? 

O that some profit stand to my account 

When doomsday breaks and every hour is weighed, 
Some trifling gain, that yet shall be a fount 
Perpetual to my glory ; so the maid 
Have risen thereby one grade of wisdom’s mount, 
Have plucked one flower of them that never fade ! 
Alas, I rave ! That perfect one, that prize 

As well of children’s love as of the old and wise 1 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

How deck the rainbow, how upon the sea 
Pour lovelier colors, how improve the look 
Of one whose tact and girlish modesty 

May not be spoke nor writ within a book ? 
Pure, noble, proudly blooming, frank and free ! 

So oft for her my wits their hearth forsook 
Within her gardens waywardly to roam 

That in her absence still were they from home. 


LXXX 

When we are touched by wrinkled age 
Your bosom, now ineffable 
As God’s most pure, unwritten page. 

No longer glorious in swell, 

War on the ravished eyes will wage 
Nor still of other beauties tell. 

Your lips will pinch, your neck turn sallow, 
Your eyesight fail and cheeks grow hollow. 

Then shall I triumph, then those lips 
I’ll press with bliss by so much clearer 
As from your frame the beauty slips 
And to your eyes the soul is nearer. 

Thus have you seen of seaworn ships 
Crumbled in wreck the lifelong steerer 
Feel for the hulk more love and pride 
Than e’er for yachts that brave the tide. 


7 ° 


Love Poeins of Louis Bar naval 


LXXXI 

What fiend accurst, what fateful string awry 
Jars the soft music of your atmosphere ? 

What would they here 

Frowns, shrugs and silences and looks that tie 
Tongue to the throat ? 

What phrases float 

Unshaped and yet with evil portents in their 
note ? 


The sweetest lute has hours of discord vain, 
The fairest forehead is not always clear, 

Nor surely steer 

Pilots for aye across the uncertain main. 

Are pilots then at fault 
Or billows fierce and salt 
That all is wreck beneath an unclouded vault ? 


At times your presence seems to hold a poison 
That frets my soul. I know not why the cheer 
Of life should disappear 
And noisome damps trouble the clear horizon. 
Half false, half real they seem 
Like spectres in a dream ; 

I swim in vain up an unending stream. 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 


7 1 


LXXXII 

More names than one are writ upon my heart. 

More names than one 
To me are dear and form of life a part — 

And yet the list shall want the name wherewith it was 
begun. 

After the death my restless heart embalm, 

After the death — 

And scan it well as palmists read a palm, 

Then certify how oft of love each fateful wrinkle saith. 

Right through the heart a smooth keen razor bear, 
Right through the heart — 

Look and be silent. What is written there 
Formed of my life and soul on earth the only genuine 
part. 


LXXXIII 

When long in rapture thy twin rose I press 
I ask myself within that joyful daze, 

Can falsehood harbor with such earnestness, 

Can drafts of bliss that two winged souls amaze 
Be followed by a surfeit of the spirit ? 

Then am I bold and wise, then am I sure 
Untruth can only come to them that fear it 
And foul suspicion haunt a mind impure. 


72 Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 

No, such ail one as thou much more than seemest ; 

A woman so frank, so loving, truthful, just, 

With soul so weighed betwixt the schooled and free — 

Small man, in her more truth lies than thou dreamest; 
In her deep bosom thou shalt moor thy trust 
As slumbering fishers trust the fruitful sea. 


LXXXIV 

Hard by a lake of azure near a hill 

Stands a vast building of the middle ages. 
Pinnacle, arch and curious gargoyle fill 

With patterns intricate the several stages 

And mock aloud against the thoughtful grace 
That bloomed from stone in Hellas, lit the pages 

Of classic bards ; and as the Gothic race, 

Despite the chaos in its written lore, 

Shook from its pens the trammels that oppress 

Loftiest of thinkers, so the turrets soar 

Through barbarous and unrestricted wealth 
Of grovelling forms, up where the free winds pour 

By flumes unseen the glorious wine of health, 

Where clean are snow and rain, and all the mesh 
Of vapors creeping from the town by stealth 


73 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 

Through the sharp thunderbolt is rendered fresh . . . 

To you I speak, woman, that long hast stood 
A fair cathedral present in the flesh, 

Refuge of arts, garden of thoughts that bud, 

Fruitful amongst a waste of spectres lean, 

Ruddy, though mixed with masks devoid of blood, 

Singular, proud and rugged, full of spleen 

And yet whose head o’ertops the highest cloud, 

Ay, comrade of the bright celestial queen 

When fast earth sleeps, when stars ring clear and loud ! 


LXXXV 

There lurks a deadly beauty in the air ; 

Down the long wedge of street the fronts are 
gray 

With silvery grayness rich and warm and rare. 
Mark, in the shadows! there is that to-day 
Of liquid loveliness outpoured on all 
That gilds the landscape with an immortal ray 
And makes the driest factory-roof and wall 
Palettes whereon the subtlest colors play. 

I know such visions, ah, too well ; they mean 
That woful storm shall mar to-morrow’s face ; 

That once again the gods have envious been, 

4 


74 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 

And what they loved to raise will now debase ; 
That nothing lasts ; that such unearthly sheen 
Is but the sleuthhound’s music on the trace. 


LXXXVI 

Last night by chance one little word, 
A word of gall, a word that bit . 
No harm had come had I not heard 
For naught was meant by it. 

But rankles on like poison sown 

The baleful word, the word accurst ; 
It raised a devil of its own 
On flame and acid nursed. 

It will not off. Within my mind 
It withers on like vampire bird 
Or hellborn goblin fast inshrined : 

God ! — Why say just that word ? 


LXXXVII 

If you depart from our demented town 

I know not what this wretched mind will do. 
For it supports each posing social clown, 

Each pitiful snob of the grand-lady crew, 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

Because not yet their venomous cLck may drown 
The tower of loveliness that soars in you, 
Without whom in this labyrinthine prison 
The sun’s extinct — life has no reason. 


LXXXVIII 

While the leaves and the dust-clouds are whirling 
What has come to the dreams of my girl ? 

Is the strand of your secrets unfurling 
As the sea-fog unravels a curl ? 


Now alas for the thoughts that were brooding 
Hid away in the shades of your heart, 

For ambition too early excluding 
Every fair thing in love by its art ! 


Shall you go like the sky-fondled gentian 
Hunted down by a hope that’s a doom ? 
Over year there is never a mention 
Of the flower on the hill of its bloom 


But it grows far away from the mountain 
Where of dew in the morning it drank 
And its leafage is drenched by a fountain 
Where the soil is too rich and too rank ; 


76 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

Let it wax, the poor show ! let it tower 
Till the folk think its splendor has come : 

It is dead. For the dark azure flower 
Will not blossom away from its home. 

LXXXIX 

Leave me not single-handed to the fight 
With morbid thoughts, bestial demoniac dreams, 
Lest ocean be no bar to haunting screams 
Wailed o’er the brine from my forsaken spright, 
Lest, when you smile upon a gladsome sight, 

Sun turn a portent of enjaundiced beams 
And as with blurs the sickly eyeball teems 
Your vision plunge into a wan twilight. 

Ay, think, dear child, how you are all untried 
In shocks the tempter wreathes in verdant leaves 
As Bacchanals would hide the edge of spears ; 

Think ere you dare to brave the all-changing tide 

How joy to come like fairy-gold deceives 

But love that lives daunts the remorseless years. 

xc 

While uncertain I adored you 
Who so pressing, who so kind ? 

Once enmeshed, my love has bored you, 
Elsewhere turns your mind. 


77 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

Tell me, scorner, what is catching 
More than treason, more than scorn ? 
There may be surprises hatching 
For a maid forlorn ! 


XCI 

Then go — and find a gentler tongue than mine 
But none more true ! 

Go, and across a thousand leagues of brine 
At moments rue 

The lot of one whose lamp has ceased to shine, 
Whose sun was you. 

Go, for the world of sugared speech is full, 

But you must pay 

In some queer coin. It ever was the rule 
And sure world’s way 

To tear with briers from wilful lambs the wool 
When sure the prey. 


Go, to be wise and travelled and betrayed ; 

But though you roam 

From Spain to China, though you be waylaid, 
Robbed of your home, 

Ruined, defaced and shamed — be undismayed ; 
Come to me, come 1 


yS Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

Come, not to find me glorying in your plight 
But that I prove 

Weight in the words that you esteem so light, 
So I may move 

Your cynic soul to feel and judge aright 
My stainless love. 


XCII 

Go, it must be. But O that I had force 
All good I own into your veins to drain ! 

May it not serve if on your brow I strain 
My utmost will ? Straight to the scheming brain 
Is there for my thought’s anguish, then, no sure and 
psychic course ? 

Turn your round ear. Thus the sweet gate I touch 
Where nobly were my speeches entertained. 

O earlet pink, hereby art thou maintained 
Deaf and fast-barred against the unrestrained 
Poison of those false-innocents daubed with corruption’s 
smutch ! 

And eyes unsated still with worldly pomp, 

For aye ye thus are bound by love’s fine spell ! 

Turn, turn aside from what ye would not tell 
To those at home, or for a moment dwell 
Indignant on them as on thieves breaks out by night a 
lamp. 


79 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

And O, red mouth, over thy rose I yearn 

With love past speech. Thou most perfected bloom 
Of womanhood, be secret as the tomb, 

In thy sweet garden let these find no room, 

Words that are ugly or unfair, words that will sting or 
burn ! 

White breast whereon my tears of parting fall, 

If in thy palace shadow of baseness lurk, 

Thus do I lay my ban as holy clerk 
Taught from on high upon the trace of murk 
And for the queen, thy stately soul, hallow and purge 
the hall ! 


XCIII 

O car of gold, upwheeled by crystal steeds 
From rough horizons of a city roof, 

O golden car, mark how the steamship speeds 
A weaver’s shuttle through the ocean’s woof 
Of wave and current like a thing from man and beast 
aloof! 

Black and unhalting, how it cleaves the surge, 

Throbs though it lives not and yet lives in motion, 
Though zephyrs music make, or though the dirge 
Of gathering tempest wail across the ocean, 

Onward the black projectile flies in soulless rapt devo- 
tion. 


So Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 

O watch-tower moon, tell me if some one props 
Her head on hand and stares upon your face ! 

See’st thou aboard a maiden who o’ertops 
All maidens with a rare and sovereign grace, 

Sits she in dream, or to and fro wanders with restless 
pace ? 

Ah moon, gold moon, that see’st and hear’st as well, 
Can’st thou no word upon her lips define ? 

Hath she confided to thy witching spell 
The name she loves ? Answer by love’s great sign 
Thy bended bow, sweet moon, and say the name she 
breathes is mine ! 


xciv 

Autumn draws ruddy toward its close 

And soon beneath the coal-black branches 
Winter, the polar snow-bear, shows 
His ivory teeth ; upon his haunches 
Hurries the hoyden Spring, a rose 
After the coward beast she launches . . . 

And then comes June, alas, sans you ! 

How can I live the summer through ? 

’Tis best to die in tender Spring 

For then birds, flowers, the air, the earth 
With hopes delicious burgeon, ring, 

Smile, light with inarticulate mirth 


Love Poems of Louis Barnavcil 

While horrible Time beneath his wing 

Conceals the lie that lurks in birth . . . 

Suppose you loved me, O my sun, 

I’d still find sunspots, though I won. 

Fruition — what is that but death ? 

Desire’s the only aim for men ; 

On earth no thing that draws a breath, 

Nor plant, nor bird of hill or fen, 

Nor crystal of the rock but saith 

A truth whose fulness clogs the pen — 

In growth alone we hope retain ; 

Follow, still follow ; never gain ! 

They prate of rationalistic schools, 

The harm they do a vulgar age . . . 

Can priestly or can atheist rules 
Recarve a line on history’s page ? 

Can man with all his pygmy tools 

War on the woods of the actual wage ? 
Darwin or Leo, right or wrong, 

Each man must wail the same old song. 

XCV 

Wreathed ah how wondrously of snow 
The garlands white and purple-shaded 
Which liberal gifts of air bestow ! 

But what of garlands mired below — 

Of waste of sympathy, of woe 
That somehow sympathy evaded ? 

4 * 


81 


82 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 

And see the tints behind the glass 
That dye this moon-moth’s fragile wing, 
Then ponder, marvel o’er the mass 
Of moths as fine that by the crass 
Neglect of nature like the grass 
Perished, nor found the one grand thing — 


The mate with whom, divinely mad, 

To speed the sweetbrier copses through, 
About the sweet-bay swamp to gad 
And lovingly, in moonbeams clad, 

Inhale the fragrant lotus-pad, 

A shadow to its body true ! 


Neglect? But is it negligence 
This waste of nature everywhere ? 

What ears, what eyes are ours ? Which sense 
Is full, then — perfect and intense — 

Which is it ? O the deep, the dense 
Conceit of man ! O quick despair ! 


These insects, birds and little things 
That feed on moon-moths, are not they 
Fair in their manner ? Shall their wings 
Lack lustre while the moon-moth flings 
By thousands forth ? Must rings in rings 
Break that one tribe shall have its way ? 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 

Regard a mustard-seed, uphold 
Its bulk against life’s hearth and haunt 
Enormous sun. When inward rolled 
Are thoughts as infinite of mould 
As Nature throws you, cease to scold : 
Not Nature, you are ignorant. 


xcvi 

With languid look the gentleman of ease 
Strolls to his club, the car-horse pants, and black 
Have grown the flags with shopmen who like bees 
Swarm from the basement of yon iron stack 
And pour two ways ; the starveling urban trees 
Are etched amazing on a heavenly soil 
Whose tender greenness jars and yet agrees 
Mysteriously with all the city roil. 


It is the hour when wistfulness the mind 
Invades as shadows climb the roofs above, 
It is the hour when in the heart a sigh 


Loosening its wing will whisper, not unkind, 
A pensive word : Dearer than woman’s love 
Is yonder sunset fading in the sky ! 


8 4 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 


xcvn 

Am I a traitor, then ? The west at times 
So tender grows, so infinitely fair, 

Methinks no mortal should be aim for rhymes 
Since the sky beckons far more jewel-rare. 

The tulip tree in early Spring that opes 

Fresh green broad hands, the wondrous lines and hues 

Of landscape where the ravished vision gropes 
From broad to fine, from near to deeper views — 

A gush of song, a passage in a book, 

That tear the soul with a tumultuous throb . 

Am I a traitor to prefer to look 

On them, and her of rightful incense rob ? 

Unjust is he that would delight alone ; 

Ah that with her my every joy had share ! 

But fate has frowned, and so with secret moan 
I live my life and seem too light for care. 


LOUIS BARNAVAL 


PART II 




I 


SUNNY city, pleasant- faced, 

Town of thrift and town of waste, 
Down whose shining thoroughfares 
Lovely ugly dames and men 
Gayly jostle ; grain and tares ; 

Hearth of virtues, yet a den ; 
Home of horrors, haunt of taste ! 


Surely from your glowing skies 
Falter influences wise — 

Skies of turquoise, mauve and rose, 
Emerald down the westering way 
When the king of life repose 

Seeks in crimson down, and gray 
Moons in purple spaces rise. 


Merely living in delight 
On a day so rich, so bright 
Off, thou spectre of a hurt! 

Every passer is a friend 
And each woman, I assert, 

Is a lady whom attend 
Courteous heroes, mild in might. 


88 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

ii 

How desolate the sumptuous manse 

Which you, my lost one, lately haunted! 
It is a visage whence the glance 

Of joy, the cheeks where color flaunted, 
Becks, frowns, lovelooks and looks askance 
Have gone as withers gold enchanted : 
When all are gay and laugh within 
I only see the death’s-head grin. 


Ill 

Gone is my treasure, but not to her grave, 

Vanished and lost with a frown as farewell; 

They who o’erweeningly happiness crave 
Often of misery tell. 

Where is the dew of the damask-rose mouth ? 

Where the locks fragrant as squawberry blossom, 
Where the rich hand like a fruit of the south, 

Where the cool spice-laden bosom ? 

Where are the limbs like to trees rounded fair ? 

Where, the soft billows that swim with her gait ? 
Where, the smooth back, the high insteps that bear 
Loveliness onward in state ? 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 89 

Misery, spare me this prize from your talons, 
Wretchedness, come not the truthless one near, 
Down to her side, O luck, with the balance, 

Sorrow, dry quickly her tear ! 

Slipt from the view like the sheen of the iris, 

Melted sheer off as a cloud from sun’s wheel, 
Maiden, may falsehood consuming its virus 
Spare you the anguish I feel ! 


IV 

Since I was left a prey to loneliness, 

Contempt, self-torture ; since without redress 
Are harms by me and by my dearest done, 

A thought of thoughts my every vein has won, 

And, gazing eastward o’er the waves that bloom 
Like fields of flowers that change from light to gloom, 
From paley rose to incarnadine or black 
As blossoms near the forest-fire’s track, 

Now purple, now so vernal-fresh in sheen 
The painter dares not imitate its green, 

I am resolved no longer to abide 
A butt for worldlings, nor behold the tide 
With hideous sloth engulf the dreary strand, 

Pause and return and leave me to this land. 

If die I must, to my too early fate 
Let me be borne magnificent in state 


90 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

Yet always nearing, since this world of chance 
Is not all trade but has its own romance, 

That one I love ! Behold ; I built me staunch 
A barque ill-starred upon the sea to launch, 

A yacht with keel of platinum and sides 
Of fragrant cedar which the axe divides 
On frosty mornings in the upland woods, 

Its ribs of copper chiselled o’er with hoods 
Of inland gentians near the sweet seas growing, 

Its deck of silver, dug where foam is flowing 
Through dizzy cliffs of lilac stone, of rose, 

Of hues no man the tale and tally knows, 

And bulwarks gold, from hills whose kernel man 
Has searched where streams before the deluge ran. 

A boat of state, a yacht that is a bier : 

The tapering mast of redwood straight I rear ; 

At foot, of ironwood a dais dark ; 

The yards are birch-trees young and white of bark. 
My sails in warp are cobweb and in woof 
The down from thistles ; of my dais roof 
The thatch is sweetgrass pinned with cactus thorn ; 
My ropes, the creepers by the cedar borne, 

And there among the water’s troubled yeast 
Like a chained osprey fronts the prow the East. 

Eyes opaline from bows that steeply sheer 
Gaze toward the sky line where the dawns appear 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 91 

And high upborne above the wild wave shock 
A figure carved from crystal of the rock 
All lucent, save for one malignant cloud 
Within the bosom where the heart beats loud. 

The hawser parts, the stem devours the wave, 

The western winds about the sternpost rave, 

Full blow the sails, and, longing for the fray, 

For the high seas my bark has quit the bay. 


Whither ? I have at mast-foot lain me down 
Careless at last however fate shall frown. 

The tiller blocked, the sheets made fast, the land 
Falls in the west ; death holds me in his hand. 
Come storm or calm, I shall not reck a whit, 

In Arctic seas shall feel no trembling fit. 

The sun may burn, the whirlwind round me 
rave, 

Well shall I know to keep a visage grave — 

One chance alone ! if her hand touch my head 
Mine eyes shall open though my soul be fled. 


V 

What gladness you convey by touch of hand 
Can not be spoke, can not be thought ; 

This world of mortals is too gross a land 

That therewithal should earthly tongues be fraught. 


92 Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 

Whose purity is like the peaks of snow 
Untrod, unknown, a whiteness felt, 

Yet seen as silvery-blue by those below 

Who live and breathe because the snows will melt. 


If we should part and pass to separate ways 
With stifled sigh, averted head, 

Within a land where centuries are as days 

Our love shall live though flesh and wrong lie dead. 


VI 

Would that I might on eagle’s wing arise 
Upborne in spirals to the outmost skies 
Where earth a bossy globe far inward lies 
Whence godlike eyes 


Lit by the beams that ever roll through space 
May catch through thousand leagues of air the trace, 
The quick effulgence, the untutored grace 
Of one lost face — 


Then, with the swiftness of the lightning’s flare, 
Would I might hurl me through resistant air 
And touch, O chastely, ere it were aware, 

A bosom bare — 


93 


Love Poems of Louis Bar?iaval 

My lips all trembling with respect, desire, 

Anguish, awe, worship — love that haunts the mire, 
Love that is watchword in the heavenly choir, 

Love that is fire ! 


And with such lambent, clarifying glow 
Press that the bosom like fine wax should grow, 
The sweet frame melt in fragrant cloud, and so 
Upward should flow 


To steep my veins and heart and inmost bone, 
For miseries long, for thirsty droughts atone, 
That so my soul should lie no more alone 
Sick, blind, o’erthrown ! 


VII 


Lamp of my path 

And beacon to my footsteps faint, 

Guide in the dark, refreshment to endeavor, 
This love for you strange byways hath 
Untrod by saint 

Yet most delicious and of heavenly savor ; 
The graver’s subtle tool 
Must fail to cut and penman fairly write 
The hidden ways whereby I used your light. 


94 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 

Not by one rule 

Did I absorb your loveliness 
Or come to meet your wide unconscious gaze, 
When most I played the fool. 

You did not guess 

That then I basked most hot within your rays, 
That I was there to drain 

Long opiate drafts that raised me, for the spell, 

To a ridge of fame from out a living hell. 

When you would strain 

Apart your glorious lids in scorn, 

Yet was there one whom sneering could not touch, 
For then was this dull brain 
With such bliss torn 
As never yet did opium-eaters clutch ; 

All, all your wealth 

Served only to augment the wicked measure 
Of fierce, untrammelled, rich, narcotic pleasure ! 


VIII 

Yellow and amberhued pink white gold-red 
Roses for one pulled who at last came not, 

Roses, your perfumes to the dustiest spot, 

Each cobweb of my attic now are sped 
And soothe me with a fond reproach when all com- 
plaints are said. 


95 


Love Poems of Loicis Barnaval 

Droop the head, beauties, ah, and rain your leaves 
Along the bare and sunrift-powdered floor ! 

Though death be nigh, could ye have blossomed 
more ? 

Did ye not waste beneath my humble eaves 

As much, to you, as all the West’s innumerable sheaves ? 


Generous, celestial, rainbow-tinctured souls, 

Too great to murmur at your slender fate, 

Would you were fixed in firm and gorgeous state 
On convent walls where daily upward rolls 
To heaven the incense for that queen whose meekness 
heaven controls ! 


Roses, I am so lonely in the waste ! 

And ye too pass, and sunsets flit and fade ; 

The birds are going; music dies while made 
And every noble thing away must haste : 

I linger here and think on one henceforth forlorn, dis 
graced. 


Why should man seem so noble — and not be ? 

Why from his heart shed forth a perfume rare 
That only seems to embalm the troubled air ; 

Why talk so true, why be so fair to see, 

Why wrap about him snakeskin robes rank with hypo- 
crisy ? 


96 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

Roses, farewell ! I would not keep you here 
To linger longer in a tradesman’s world ; 

In vain to those your wonders are unfurled 
Who hold the high thing cheap, the base thing dear. 
The cry is gold ! Your priceless charms will only raise 
a sneer. 


IX 


Migrant bird of the mighty wing 
Whither away ? 

To the East, to the isle of eternal spring 
Where the crags are rosy-gray. 

Would’st fly, wee bird, with your shred of song 
Thither away ? 

Ay, broad wings, for a rose I long 
That is sweeter than loads of hay. 

Could I but mount on your brawny vans, 
Whither away 

Should we go save thither where meet the clans 
Of the hawk and the sea-osprey ? 

Then mount, O bird, like a winged heart ! 
Thither away, 

How we cleave the cloud and evade the dart 
Of the rainbolt ! Hear them say 


97 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

Down below : ‘ O bird of the wide strong wing, 
Whither away ? 

What music you make ! Who taught you to sing ? ’ 
* It was Love. I’m his angel to-day.’ 


x 

A battle royal from the first, dear heart ; 

Hardly we met, before the waspish foils 
Were crossed and clashed : 

Thrust and riposte, advance, retreat, tierce, quarte, 
The vigorous sixte, the octave full of wiles, 

Coupes that flashed 

And fiercely o’er the other’s rapier dashed ! 

As if our hate were worse than mortal foes, 

And any woes 

Were better than a flowery day of peace. 

When did we cease 

With sterile fights that only left us sore 
To waste the hours of joy that come no more ? 

Love should be blind and I the lover 
Who only knows the starry blaze 
Which kindles in your look, O glorious woman ! 
What fate is mine that I discover 
Motes in the clearest moony rays 
And clay in features that are more than human ! 
Can I the courage summon 
5 


98 


Love Poems of Louis Darnaval 

To say, I do not love aright ? 

O, you are all a man should dream, 

But I, alas, ’tis I who teem 

With vices, faults, with pride and spite — 

As fit to raise to you these eyes 
As grovelling moles to scale the eternal skies ! 


XI 

I called you barbarous but whose 
Barbarity is worse than mine 
That with a shameless brow abuse 
A woman with that look divine, 

One whose rare tender humor woos 

Like perfumes from long-treasured wine ? 
For who am I to dare to chasten 
You with a voice shrill, snarling, brazen ? 


Perhaps we both are barbarous lovers 
In rough new lands, of kindred rude, 
And ours, O cursed race, discovers 
Too late that love however crude 
O’er its own nest with kindness hovers, 
Attacks the foe, but not its brood. 
No matter. You may still awaken 
To-morrow morn a maid forsaken ! 


99 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 

For I can leave you, in the flesh, 

While loving on. You doubt? Then, sever 
For good and all, O silken mesh 

That held me fast ! No wits are clever 
Enough that thread to knit afresh. 

Lo, as I write, you’re lost forever ! 

My hand is firm, I do not frown. 

Bah ! must a tear come trickling down ? 


XII 

From strong old France my forefathers 
Adventured forth to Florida — 

Poor men, rich souls. And yet how raw 
Are they in whom a metal stirs 
Reason from truth and law ! 

Tell us, Cathayans full of guile, 

Whence came the rings and armlets thick ? 
Hide not the place. Make answer quick, 
Or, by our swords, your cringing smile 
Shall fade beneath the stick ! 

Then rose in answer tales of old, 

How Eldorado, close inbound 
With jungles void of life or sound, 

With quagmires, mountains, held the gold 
Like brown dirt in the ground. 


ioo Love Poems of Louis Bariiaval 

And then — why tell how brave men died 
Slowly, by twos, beneath the glare 
Of deserts, poisoned by the air, 

Strange waters, arrows? Far and wide 
No land of gold was there. 

So did I venture from my home 
Sport of a like ancestral craze, 

And saw, O charms that fiercely blaze, 

My sad love’s Eldorado bloom 
Behind your savage ways. 

XIII 

Why should I not confess me ? This fair morn 
Your outlines farther from my bosom stand 
Than figures Turner painted to adorn 
Vast distances in some Saturnian land. 

Is it a fairy goddess trips the strand 
Or does she print a hoof-mark ? Or, forlorn, 

Stalks a mere woman of clay all clad in scorn 

Who stares on seas unknown with tight-clenched hands ? 

Who can respond ? I only know, your face 
Is blotted out from memory’s latter pages 
With hardly a perfume of you left behind. 

Love is quite dead. Hatred no longer rages, 

But insolent pity, who affects the kind, 

Smooths all the past with hollow commonplace. 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 


IOI 


XIV 

When to Peru the Spaniards came 
Bigots and full of lowborn scorn, 

Poor Indians hailed them with the name 
Of sons of the Sun, made haste to adorn 
With gems their foes. Did I the same ? 

Once, but no more ! My bonds are torn 
And I prefer the mountains cold 
To you, your jarrings and your gold. 

Peter of Candia was a Cretan brave 
The best of all Pizarro’s brutal crew 
Who all alone, his starving friends to save, 
Marched on a strange walled city of Peru. 
Though armed at point, he bore the stave 
Whereon Christ died. The Indians flew 
Against the stranger, bore him down, 
Dragged him in fetters to the town. 


Peter of Candia was prepared to die 

When to a den of jaguars he was passed, 

Then out he flashed his good sword from his thigh, 
Rejoiced to breathe in glorious fight his last. 

But lo, approaching to the jaguars nigh, 

Themselves the captive beasts before him cast ! 
Like him I too resee the air above 
Saved from the tigerish kindness of your love. 


102 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 


xv 

’Twas dark when Spanish hypocrites 
With Colon gladly cast their lots ; 
Nor recked his gay or spleenful fits 
But used him for their plots. 


A motley crush of thieves and priests, 

He sailed them west, he sailed them south 
Brawling and horning like to beasts, 

Up to a river’s mouth. 


Hell in the bark ; a Paradise 
The island where by sickle shore 
Golden from groves Elysian rise 
Temple and palace hoar. 


So forth they speed, the good, the bad, 
Vicious and wise, to stretch their limbs ! 
For wine or jewels some are mad ; 

All race to sate their whims. 


Who cares, though Colon sternly charge 
4 Stray not ! one hour is all allowed ’ ? 
They range away like goats at large 
Laughing at word so proud. 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

And few are wise. The rattlesnake 
Has poisoned one ; another, ta’en 

At violence, for a damsel’s sake 
By jealous hand is slain. 

A third has found within the brook 

Great store of gems ; with odds and ends 

He loads his cloak ; his friends forsook, 

Slow toward the shore he wends. 

A fourth hews down a stately tree 
To seize on twigs that shine like gold, 

A fifth ascends the fane with glee 
To filch him wealth untold. 

A trumpet, hark ! The ended hour ! 

Sweet hour, departed all so soon ! 

We stay, swear these ! One fruit, one flower 
Cry. others as they run ! 

The anchor’s up, the cock-boat brings 
The last who e’er return at all. 

How the ship rocks, how sharply stings 
The harsh claw of the squall ! 

The earliest come have seized the best, 

The later, fagged with haste and toil, 

Stand shivering, each protruding vest 
Swelled with a varied spoil. 


104 Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 

And now, behold, the gems are dross, 
And soon the flowers are foul indeed ! 
The fruits rot fast and sailors toss 
All forth lest sickness breed. 

And as he sails the bushy beard 
Of Colon wears a bitter smile : 

To fair new lands what have I steered ? 
Greed, force, and hate, and guile ! 


XVI 


As with word-weary eyes my twilight room 
I quit, from off* the outlook vast are seen 
Sheets of broad dusk, each but a windy screen 
Of the world-mill that ceaseless, gloom on gloom, 
Falls and time is. And so the spectres loom 
Of ill-spent days, blotting the traces green 
Of hope from out my soul, and making mean 
Lofty ideals, thoughts of our life and doom. 

My slow-raised past I now would be undoing, 

The struggle long, the faithfulness I rue, 

Chiding myself a fool to dream of suing, 

A greater fool an unkind heart to sue : 

Poor loser in a race not worth pursuing 
Where is the spot in you I find is true ? 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 105 


XVII 

When first he ravaged the Peruvian lands 
Pizarro, chief and torturer of his peers, 

Imbibed through greedy all-believing ears 
Tales of the golden and the silvery strands, 

Tales of a nation boastful by the waters 

Where streams like seas meet in a mightier flood, 
Tales of the women who their flesh and blood 
Spare not, but give each infant son to slaughter. 

Greed saw it rise, the glittering high-faned town 
Far in the wood wastes, and desire, the shining 
Of golden cornices, the gems entwining 
Locks that the feathers of the warbird crown. 

Thirsted for them the gross Pizarro spirit : 

* Set on, O comrades, at the last we know, 

Where fitly love lurks under woman’s blow 
In warrior wives who warrior souls inherit ! 

‘ These lovely Amazons whom Indians fear 

Our conquest be ! From their strong loins compel- 
ling 

Our sons, we shall all Indian imps rebelling 
Master for aye, and a vast kingdom rear ! * 

5 * 


106 Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 

A Barnaval with many a comrade clashes 
Sword on his helm. Alas for firm set wills ! 
Alas for tangles of Madeira’s hills ! 

The parrot screams above their moldering ashes. 


XVIII 

Your name ! The great and close-crammed sheet 
That pours its flood of news abroad 
Before the sun has left his seat 

Below the waves, that sheet abhorred 
By poets and by dreamers drowned 
In fantasies from fairy ground . 

Your name ! In fine type lost and merged, 

Nor blazoned forth, nor broadly placed 
Among the news all night that surged 
O’er vast plateaus, that sang and raced 
Beneath the salt seas . . . Yet mine eye 

Found it as homing doves will fly. 

Your name ! My God, what is’t to me 
If you be here, or there, or yon ? 

Between us lies infinity 

Of cold and insult ; done is done ; 

Now, for that smile I used to prize 
I would not deign to raise mine eyes. 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 


xi x 

To all returned but one, to all 

Your friends of childhood and of youth — 
When the black portals of your hall 
About you opened bare uncouth, 

A thought was yours for great and small, 

On me alone you had no ruth ; 

Yet will I stake my hopes on high 
The one real friend you have is I. 

Should I to western wildness fly 
Or dull my pain on distant oceans ? 
Forget your loveliness and try 

To heal the old with new emotions ? 

I could not if I would and I 

Disdain such poor and coward notions. 
No, I shall brave it out and stay — 

See you, if need be, day by day. 

Though crawling horror, agony 
And death in life shall be my part 
Against myself I here decree 

The slow doom of a shrivelling heart, 

And though the world be blind or see 

No scream shall come, no sweat shall start 
So that at last you too believe 
That I have long, long ceased to grieve. 


io8 Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 

Yet, as the workman in the shop 

Where phosphorus lies absorbs the same 
And through his body, drop by drop, 

His blood bears on that dormant flame 
Until he dies and surgeons chop 
And analyze his shattered frame, 

So, were the microscopes but true, 

Each fibre of me would tell of you. 


XX 

Dear girl ! Heart’s blood ! . . . Alas, forgive me, 

sweet, 

Such foolish and familiar words of thee ! 

For like wild birds that ’gainst the barriers beat, 

So do my random thoughts dash desperately 
Against the facts that my young blossoms cheat. 

Wrapped in a dream, I seem your face to see 
As with warm love it glows on me and yearns : 

I tread the air ; my foot the star -field spurns. 


XXI 

My dreams are amber clouds, 

A rolling vapor shrouds 

The shapes of town, of river and of land ; 

Bent to the brain’s fine gale 
Vast outlines wax and pale 

As gods at feast recumbent loom upon a haunted 
strand. 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 109 

Starshine and cries of earth, 

Visions, and sounds of dearth, 

Outspoken luxuries and whispered thrifts 
Have melted off as chaff 
When the glad winnowers laugh 

Under the sun in amber clouds across the horizon 
drifts. 

All thoughts unlarge and low 
The breezes from me blow, 

Mighty, colossal are the forms that stay, 

As he who stems the air 
That eagles find too rare 

Sees but the seagirt land below, notes neither reef 
nor spray. 

Lo, my own true love’s land ! 

The white gull is her hand, 

Behold her brow, behold the radiant eyes 
Of Rocky Mountain lakes 
No storm of passion shakes, 

Before whose deep the new-come dawn trembles with 
new surprise ! 


XXII 

Love that is deep, love that is clear 
From self and stain is mine 
And therefore, now that the tree-tops sleep 
Over the listening hill, I keep 


no Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 

Watch in the broad moonshine : 

My tryst is held for one most dear ; 
She’ll not be here ! 

Moon on the wane, mirror of gold, 

Love like to mine is rare, 

And therefore when in your oblong pane 
My lady yearns I know her again 
Through a million leagues of air : 

She turns a head of princely mould 
And charms the wold. 

Love of my head, love of my soul, 

I am yours to my dark-red heart, 

And therefore gazing aloft I fain 
Were sure those eyes of yours remain 
On me and never depart : 

’Tis wise, ay me ! one’s love to dole, 
Not give the whole . 

XXIII 

Did you but guess how terribly alone 

I wander on through life 

While seeming happy in a host of friends, 

You in my eyes would read the voiceless groan 
And hear through sneers the strife 
That ceaselessly my firm resolving rends 
And ever blends 

Gall with the savor of a small success. 


Ill 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

Wherethrough perhaps you would be made more tender 
Than now you are. Perhaps the truth would gender 
A flood of healing tears for my distress, 

Perhaps you might caress 

Once, as a sacred rite, this feverish head 

Before I go to join the untroubled dead. 


XXIV 

Long fasts can I maintain without one vision 
Of those great eyes of you. But then there comes 
A day when upward the old leaven foams 
When, lest the worst befall, I make decision 
To see your face. In some thick crowd I stand 
And watch you pass, moving without suspicion 
That he is nigh the buds of whose ambition 
Lie crushed and dead beneath a careless hand. 

As the poor opium-smoker must renew 
His darling vice, so must I turn to you. 


XXV 

Rush of light feet and dreamy swirl of robes, 
Music that falls as evenly as the beat 
Of wave on sand, a golden-dusted air 
That mellows strangely the incessant stare 
Of half a hundred flames in crusted globes — 
Soft panting throats, flushes on faces sweet — 


1 1 2 Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 

One is not here and yet’s in midmost dance. 

Sad under smiles and farthest when her art 
Has made you think her near as she is dear ! 

One woman makes a counterfeit of cheer, 

For, in that calm abstracted underglance, 

Do you not see she always plays a part ? 

The players dream and dancers one by one 
Slip weary forth. I see her eyeballs gleam 
Straight into mine. They know me, but, alas, 
Hardily looking elsewhere, on they pass 
And I am here. The pleasure all is done. 

’Tis ebb. I drift with refuse down the stream. 

XXVI 

Because you do not love me why should sun 

Stare dismally ? The sparrows chirp and brawl ; 
Their courses wild things, flowers and seasons run, 
And I, like them, sleep when the day is done. 

• 

Because you do not love me all the learning 
Got and to be got seems on me to pall ; 

None buys therewith a fragment of love’s yearning 
When once the elf-gold into dross is turning. 

Because you do not love me, in the night 
I waken cold and toss the empty bed, 

Question the past that did to me despite, 

Or else to you, since love has lost his might. 


II 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 

Because you do not love me how one loathes 
One’s self and sees a poor contemptible wight 
Who has no skill but his vain longing clothes 
In foolish acts, looks, words, and simple oaths ! 

Because you do not love me, all inside 

Is dark, as lacking of your heavenly grace. 

And all outside me deepens with a tide 
Of black and life no longer opens wide. 

Because you do not love me I must stand 
From you aside and ape the careless face . 

O, smile of Circe ; O, her touch of wand ! . . . 

For though I sink you will not reach a hand. 


XXVII 

How with new hope does dawn the jaded fill, 

Its white light laughing in each gloomy corner ! 

How do the heavy eyelids of the mourner 

Turn to the East and with new ardor thrill 

To see each smoke, an airy hearthsprung warner 

Of advent day, pointing its feathery quill 

Across the white page of the morning still 

One way, and that where sleeps my love, my scorner 

But at high noon they elsewhere veer in token 
That she is harsh and wants not me at all ; 

Soon are they gone and at their flight lies broken 


1 14 Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 

The false glass hope ; but in the twilight’s pall 
Between my teeth the selfish words are spoken 
May never sun rekiss this earthly ball ! 


XXVIII 

In the dun dawn the street unfurls 
Its length of snake, its human coil, 

And through the fog come shivering girls 
From humble beds to shops of toil 
Starting the feverish eddying whirls 

That grow till the ways at midday boil : 
Now must I think how softly lies 
Your comely head with curtained eyes. 

Your yielding arms and firm white breast 
Budded and bloomed in wealth and ease. 
And yet — have not they too much rest ? 

Some day, will you not envy these 
Poor hurrying work-girls meanly dressed 
Who learn perforce the arts to please ? 
Will you not rave and blame your stars ? 
Alas, ’twas you held up the bars ! 

Grant love a contest. Is it worse 
Than slow sad years of lonely pride 
When quick unmaiden freaks reverse 
Your haughty state, whereat you hide 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 115 

A humbled face, your rashness curse, 

Longing you had in girlhood died ? 

For, dream at will unsound romances, 

At length you’ll come to make the advances. 


XXIX 

Sun, hail to thee, since thou with myriad hands 
Hast flung asunder on the horizon chill 
Of dreary night the sooty marble bands 
Unstinted gold upon the town to spill, 

The gloomy town-plain where like beacon stands 
Seen but of me, lonely, and wan, and still, 

The shrine and casket of as fair a form 
As ever raised in man an amorous storm. 

Sun, be my friend, and through her chamber pane 
Speed like an angel to the nest of bliss, 

Nor knock, nor ask, but ere that she complain 
Print on her brow, O heavenly proxy, this ! 

Be bold, fear not, though you her visage stain 
With glows unwonted ! What she takes amiss 
Charge to my care, but stamp within her eyes 
A face she knew not always to despise. 

Perchance it will remind her of a day 

When birds were drunk with happiness and sang 
With open beak and pulsing throat to May 
Their ecstasy till earth and heaven rang ; 


n6 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

Perchance she will remember, with dismay, 

The flowers of friendship that in April sprang 
Were left to waste, uncared for, unperceived 
Or else of strength by cruel blasts bereaved. 

Ah that a moment I were in your place 

And like a thought could reach her lips in bow, 
Stammer thereon the litany of grace, 

Forgive, ask pardon, and about her throw 
The arms of love and my warm form efface 
Upon her bosom, till with mighty flow 
Of sympathetic currents cast aside 
Were all the barriers that two souls divide ! 

XXX 

What were your thoughts when up the aisle 
You swept, attendant on a bride ? 

Were you not haunted by a smile 
Such as you shot the day I tried 
You with a wedding-march beguile ? 

You smiled ; and hope lay down and died. 
Nor, when the solemn words were said 
Did one regret traverse your humbled head ? 

XXXI 

Two gentle women, fair and choicely dressed, 

Who listen to a sad and tender song. 

Half real and half affected, from their breast 

Heaves the slow sigh and to their eyelids throng 


Love Poc?ns of Louis Barnaval i t 7 

The traitor tears ; these two might have confessed 
Regret for men who, being constant long, 

At last, disdainful, cast aside the chain 
And left them to fastidiousness and pain. 

Dear hypocrites, like all your sisters sweet, 

You would, yet would not; loved, yet did not care ; 
Your only aim : the man before your feet ; 

Your acts : all such as drive men to despair, 

And though the hours, months, years were terribly fleet 
You lived as thoughtless as the birds of air. 

Dear hypocrites, pray God you never quaff 
That weed of naked truth which makes me laugh. 

It is no boast to say, young wives exist 
Within this sinful and unwholesome town 
Who will not struggle if discreetly kissed, 

Who straight to hell can lead men gayly down. 

With the most charming shall I keep a tryst 
And your disdain in lust and luxury drown ? 

Never. I now at least can think of you, 

Which, were I base, I should not dare to do. 

I will not say that no alluring eyes, 

No ruddy lips and prurient draperies 
Have made my pulse leap ; passions still must rise, 

And I am man, and loathe hypocrisies. 

Of you I think as hyssop, as some wise 
Cleansing elixir from corruption frees 
Corporeal man. For as my lone years lengthen 
Thoughts of your pureness my whole being strengthen. 


1 1 8 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 


XXXII 

What is it — this involved and tortured life ? 

What does the maze amount to in the end ? 

We eat, sleep, dream ; we gabble, fight and trade, 
At last to gain — what ? Some unusual good ? 
Foolish ! When we with bubbles all are done 
What but an empty sadness is our lot ? 

The huckster saves and buys of land a lot 
Thinking his happiness secure for life 
Because his top endeavor has been done ; 

Hardly well-housed, and lo, the fancied end 
Moves to a farther station ; life’s not good 
Until he mounts the next rung in his trade. 

So, won is lost, whatever be his trade. 

Now since we cannot like the wife of Lot 
Forever anchored seek our private good, 

Where shall we find what makes us bear with life ? 
How shall we fashion, that our sure-paced end 
Smile in glad memory of good actions done ? 

Only if we have loved is life well done 
For love alone is antidote to trade, 

True love, which hallows a seeming-selfish end, 
Nerves nerve, and smooths a fellow-mortal’s lot ; 
True love is death to egoism ; ’tis life, 

The only life, grace, truth and sovereign good. 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 119 


XXXIII 

O thousand lamps of a gigantic town 
Can ye not, one of you, reveal one trace ? 

Till I am gray must I pace up and down 
And never light upon her glorious face ? 

Never see fluttering her bewitchful gown, 

Yet often catch within a gaslit space 
At hide and seek behind a mimic frown 
Lovelooks that dance like butterflies in chase ? 

Or else with far-off, dazzled gaze I stare 

In at the window of a rolling coach 

And hope to find her pictured there on black ; 

Of lovely women see a host approach, 

Pass like to meteors in a splendid glare 

But not once quaver, Ha ! come back ! come back ! 


XXXIV 

I caught my breath on entering the room : 

You sat there in the old familiar place 
As once, a lovely twilight shape, the gloom 

Twice golden through the rareness of your hair and 
face. 


120 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

With a loud cry I rush to clasp the knees 

So firm, round, smooth ! Alas, to thinnest air 
Dissolve the lines that only moved to please : 

My fool’s brow strikes against your empty chair ! 


XXXV 

Among the clouds all night the windy sieves 
Scattered the town with winter’s hoary dust, 

All night my dreams were filled with no distrust 
You were not she who for my joyance lives. 

All night we wandered, hand in faithful hand, 
Along a shore as yet unspoiled by greed 
Where none were listeners but the whispery reed 
And love rose aromatic from the land. 

Thereon comes what awakening ! One grave sheet 
Of cold implacable white about me drawn 
Whereon of their lifework a thousand feet 

Some record soon shall print from place to place : 
O hideous page on which the heartless dawn 
Finds not between our doors one loving trace ! 

Her face is gone, but through the sash looks down 
A square of blue sky lawned in fleecy cloud 
And as I gaze, how exquisite and proud, 

How winsome, intimate upon the town 


I 


As autumn leaves fly up in gusts of air 
With rabid haste and know not where they go, 
Thus do my aimless thoughts at random fare 
Shrivelled and torn and strewn in wreck below 
By love too hot and hatred keen as snow ; 
Each whim ascends an unseen spiral stair 
That leads nowhither, hovers, and then in slow 
Confused gyrations drops to a hopeless lair. 

Like them, alas, I have outlived my day. 
There is no future but a slow extinction, 

No haven left but an unnumbered grave ; 

Yet would I could before I die distinction 
Confer on her who rapt all hope away ! 

I cannot name her and her honor save. 


ii 

Dust on the ways, dust in the air, fine dust 
Upon this page and on my quill, the ash 
Of hopes outburned and slag and gritty clash 
Within a mind where slowly, slowly rust 
7 


120 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

With a loud cry I rush to clasp the knees 

So firm, round, smooth ! Alas, to thinnest air 
Dissolve the lines that only moved to please: 

My fool’s brow strikes against your empty chair ! 


XXXV 

Among the clouds all night the windy sieves 
Scattered the town with winter’s hoary dust, 

All night my dreams were filled with no distrust 
You were not she who for my joyance lives. 

All night we wandered, hand in faithful hand, 
Along a shore as yet unspoiled by greed 
Where none were listeners but the whispery reed 
And love rose aromatic from the land. 

Thereon comes what awakening ! One grave sheet 
Of cold implacable white about me drawn 
Whereon of their lifework a thousand feet 

Some record soon shall print from place to place : 
O hideous page on which the heartless dawn 
Finds not between our doors one loving trace ! 

Her face is gone, but through the sash looks down 
A square of blue sky lawned in fleecy cloud 
And as I gaze, how exquisite and proud, 

How winsome, intimate upon the town 


I 


As autumn leaves fly up in gusts of air 
With rabid haste and know not where they go, 
Thus do my aimless thoughts at random fare 
Shrivelled and torn and strewn in wreck below 
By love too hot and hatred keen as snow ; 
Each whim ascends an unseen spiral stair 
That leads nowhither, hovers, and then in slow 
Confused gyrations drops to a hopeless lair. 

Like them, alas, I have outlived my day. 
There is no future but a slow extinction, 

No haven left but an unnumbered grave ; 

Yet would I could before I die distinction 
Confer on her who rapt all hope away ! 

I cannot name her and her honor save. 


II 

Dust on the ways, dust in the air, fine dust 
Upon this page and on my quill, the ash 
Of hopes outburned and slag and gritty clash 
Within a mind where slowly, slowly rust 
7 


146 Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 


Ribs of the ill-starr’d barques that shall not thrust 
A prow of iron through life’s wave, nor flash 
A way to fame, nor take wide ocean’s crash — 

The inward man dry as the outward crust. 

What, all so dark ? Nay, for a tendril tender 
Can break hard soils where mighty heats have been. 
Far off I see the petals fine that render 

Life fresh once more, when from her leaflets green 
The bellwort tolls a note of modest splendor, 

Toil, dust and heat are but her foil and screen. 


III 

Great God ! These toads that still infest her way 
Huddle in holes and beastly propagate ; 

Anon, when Luna marches forth in state, 

Majestic, amorous of departing day, 

And shows the world that love is no disgrace — 
Out crawl these toads and blubber in her face ! 

IV 

Ah, in this greenwood still the Indian pipe 

Grows white and strange, the thrushes liquid sing 
And deadly nightshades nod their berries ripe 
And round the knoll the forest giants spring 
Fencing with leafy slats our glade and bower 
And o’er the rock their golden shadows fling. 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 147 

It was just here I had you in my power 

Yet would not touch the curl upon your brow 
Ere you should give to me the pallid flower 
Upon your breast. Ah, wilful beauty, how 
Could I with rude hand seize the bliss withheld, 

How act the brute when you would not allow ? 


The Indian pipe which in my hand I held 

Turned slowly black ; the while it drooped I knew 
It stood in sign of loss. Then I rebelled : 

From out my tortured heart the anguish drew 
A bitter deadly speech. Alas, alas, 

That pygmy word such giant harm can do 1 


In thought full oft that chequered day I pass, 

Once more I feel your firm warm hand in mine, 

Smell once again the odor of sweet grass 

Mixed with your breath and hear the harper pine 
Soothe my fierce longings to a gentler passion . . . 

But then, but then returns the fatal sign 


Of love withheld, and scorn, and churlish fashion ! 

With the old fury all my body burns, 

Despair but feeds my rage with double ration, 
And, while I’m hating, every muscle yearns 
To strain you in my arms as on that day 
Toward which a jaded mind incessant turns 
I would have clasped you had I had my way. 


148 Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 


v 


Yes, there are days brim-full of lavish gain 
Though careless feet have brought one to their sill, 

Yes, days there are when suns of joyance fill 
With solid gold each shadowy court of Spain, 

And, trickled o’er by smooth wide wavering chain 
Of godlike music, how the firm-turfed will 
Melts and relents until the emotions rill 
And run like water through the dry-dust brain ! 

Ah, yes, to-day, when all the world was ears, 

What found me foolish, who yestreen was wise ? 

What drink was quaffed in madness through mine eyes ? 

Through lanes of chance-turned foreheads who appears 

With tender line of cheek, a graceful guise 

And low white brow my smile might wet with tears ? 


VI 

You’ve prayed for me ! O gratitude, that I 
Should foist my baseness on your lofty spirit ! 
My name ascend from your great heart on high ! 
My welfare with your own assail the sky 
That by itself had never dared to near it ! 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 149 

It is too much to ask you, darling child, 

Mix not your soul’s wine with my brackish water, 
Enough, that often view of you beguiled 
My thoughts to good, and that your glance, when mild, 
Banned the rough devil of despite and slaughter. 

The scentless flower that startles, as we roam 
The April woods, with azure cup and slender 
Exquisite stalk, exhales about one’s home 
Rarest of perfumes ; so your fancies come 

In low-voiced phrases fragrant, true and tender. 


VII 

The spot, the month, the day, the hour ! 

Have you espied when fates are kind. 

In glades where dayflies dance, a flower 
Made to your mind ? 

And old friend, new. To-day, not blind, 
Standing before the misconstrued 
You see all true from moss-entwined 
Clean root and stalk 

Down the green sheaths that graceful bend 
To tendrils that could almost walk 
But only toward the sun can trend — 

See, see the bold 


1 50 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

Black-bearded stamens rise and gaze 
Upon the pistil’s fairy gold, 

And with the silk-soft petal rays 
Tremble and bow ! 

Behold how all is perfect made ! 

That flower unfragrant, fragrant now, 

Perfumes with sighs the listening glade, 

And lifts, a maiden from her bath, a sparkling dew- 
gemmed brow ! 


VIII 

Amber mist 
Lightly kissed 

By the sun of May capricious, 
Yellow haze 
In the maze 

Leafy of the trees delicious. 
Down the street 
Glimpses fleet 

Of a gull-wing’d yacht in motion, 
Up the sky 
Wild geese cry 

As they near the northern ocean. 

Like a vail 
Smoky-pale 

Cloudlets tinge the far horizon, 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

Fairies paint 
Hills with quaint 
Mimicry of autumn’s foison. 

Moist, at ease, 

Chant their glees 
Timid toad and salamander, 

Puffs of health 
Blow by stealth, 

All things to a love-tryst pander. 

In my room 
Hornets hum 

Rousing from their wintry slumber, 
Through the woods 
Violet buds 

Deck with blue the fallen lumber. 
What surprise ! 

Violet eyes 

Live and flash a dry heart under, 
Once all sad 
Now all glad 

I can only gaze and wonder. 


IX 

Grieve not. The mullein of the crannied wall 
Is not as brave and straight, 

Flaunting, at ease, magnificently tall 
As many a roadside mate, 


151 


152 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

Yet crowns the stone with a far lovelier hood ; 

On smitten stocks grow pears of dainty flavor 
And wounded maples liquid sweets exude, 

Eagles are all the braver 

Though the mean whining lead have lamed their wing ; 
Deeds of great manhood spring 
From snubs of fortune, and the shaken brain 
Most strangely will attain 

To feats undreamt though blows have sought its death 
with might and main. 


X 

You must not gaze too fondly, friend, on me : 

A thirsty wood may seem what it is not 
And landscapes cool and verdury may be hot 
And gape for showers too fierce for amity. 

We are but friends, not brethren, no, nor kindred, 
Yet in my veins rise the tumultuous meres 
Of likes and longings that may fright your soul 
Or cause an ache that wisdom might have hindered. 

Move me not much, nor let your music roll 
Its cool-warm serpent folds about mine ears ; 

Be unaware, if sometimes, when you gaze 
Deep in my eyes, I start awestruck, ashamed, 

And, muttering lame excuses feebly framed, 

Rush from your presence in an angry maze. 

I am your friend, but you, O innocent, 

Know not, such looks are for a husband meant. 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 


153 


XI 


Ah, from the brow of this transcendent hill 
When we are lost before the ocean’s face 
And both our spirits ride on billowy space 
Where linger then the law and human will ? 

Are we not one ? are we not more than friends 
When earth is not, nor even the sea can harm ? 

Is there a human rule can thrust its arm 
Between us two when each to other tends ? 

Forgive me, you that smile, bear with my worst ; 
I sometimes rave ; at times the hard words, good, 
Bad, honor, treachery are as though immerst 

In one bright bath of color. In which mood 
I know not truth, the stable rocks are seas, 

Waves are rough stones, I walk upon the breeze. 


XII 

Strain out my life and see how little sweet 
Is mingled with the harsh ! 

Strain my life out, and see how few the grains 
Of radiant metal your sad pryings greet ! 

My life-course is a marsh 
7 * 


1 54 Love Poems of Louis Bar?iaval 

Wherein some deftly hidden gem remains 
Clear of all stains 

But lost like thoughts yet dormant in a mind. 

Be not too kind 

Lest through such heat I faint, nor yet umbrageous 
Lest the dark frown and shadow prove contagious ; 

But meet me clad all in a tender-lined 

Sad robe of neutral grays 

And let my wild nerves slumber to a tune 

Of whispers like the low-voiced fragrant wind 

That through a trellis plays 

Among white lilac buds a loving croon, 

A soothing chord, a boon 
Of sensate music where no word is framed 
And naught is named 
But where celestial rapture sinks to swell 
Through breast, through heart, through every brainy 
cell. 


XIII 

Compared with one as upright strong and fine 
As the wood hollyhocks that ne’er incline 
Their stately stems but grow as grows the pine 

I am so base, so wicked, mean and coarse, 

It is a marvel conscience leaves me force 

To play the groom when you would mount your horse ; 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 155 

The small broad foot when in my hand I feel 
And the gloved fingers to my shoulder steal, 

I blush, and at your springy weight I reel. 

You know not this, for have you not averred 
As groom I am to other men preferred 
Since like a boulder I have stood, nor stirred ? 

Just so, beloved, you shall never know 
How base I am, how coarse and far below 
Your heights of cruel but unblemished snow. 

Believe me all you think me — good and true, 

Tender, forgiving, never hating you . . . 

No storm beats here, all, all is deep June blue ! 

Thus have you fixed a standard for my aim 
Unreachable, even as the wise men claim 
A curve exists, that, like a tongue of flame 

Which comes and burns not, ever curving near 
Nearer, more near, so marvellous can steer, 

It comes and comes, yet never strikes the sphere 

XIV 

What is it ranks the seeming careless files 
Of white on blue against the dark vault of heaven ? 
What sows with freedom yet with grace most even 
The brown trees through the landscape, ay, what piles 


156 Love Poems of Louis Barn aval 

The snow in subtle lines and adds a leaven 
Of hidden order to the ocean’s isles ? 

How comes it that with flowers the meadow smiles 
And symmetry is found in star-groups seven ? 

Ask that and answer it by asking this : 

Unerring as the lark that splits the blue 
What power guides the steps of lovers true 

One way to meet in overwhelming bliss ? 

Why through the veins of twain are currents whirled 
Symmetrical, akin with all the world ? 

XV 

Or was’t the grove of pines that clothe the hill 
Or laughing lakes that gem the middle vale 
Or those high piles of foam-clouds that are still 
As ships the gods along the nadir sail ? 

Was’t yellow blooms that all the meadows fill 
Or shadows chasing over wood and pond 
That found me on a sudden all too fond 
And brought me her to be my good and ill ? 

No, none of these, it was the mad south wind, 

The wind is she who soothes, dissolves and warms, 
That foots, a queen, with noiseless spicy feet 

My breast and brews a hush of tropic storms : 
These still must seek to flash with smothered heat 
In love’s true lightnings, clean and fiercely kind. 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 157 


XVI 

By separate trails and parallel 

How sad to stroll and know not why, 
With here and there a glimpse of sky, 
Each loiters darkling through his dell ! 

Lofty the banks and thick the hedge, 

Bright fern and flower on either hand — 

At last, be witness, sea and land ! 

Two find themselves with wings afledge 

Where, mouth by mouth, each separate lane 
Juts like a trumpet from the steep . . . 

O meeting strange and dewy-deep ! 

So drop weds drop along the pane. 


XVII 

O thought of woe, that in her chamber mured 
My friend refound must hide her radiant eyes ! 

Ah woe, that on her slender temple lies 

A frozen compress and it was endured 

Her malady should otherwise be cured 

Than through my lips and cold hands brimmed with ice, 

That other ears drank in her piteous sighs 

And other tones their sympathy assured 1 


158 Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 

But if I may not lay your pillows true, 

Nor rack my busy brain in your behoof, 

O woman of the slender aspen’s form, 

Still, time a thousand marvels can perform : 

This, writ by moon’s light only, stands in proof, 

Mine eyes henceforth shall spend their strength for you. 

XVIII 

The pomp of lights, the pride and mighty round 
Of ladies gay against their escort sombre, 

The babble of tongues forever heard and drowned 
In glorious music endless as the number 
Of angels in the glory of the sun . . . 

Heads turned my way and little hands to press 
And teasing talk and looks of no, consenting, 

Then from the stage the storm and quivering stress 
Of Gretchen crazed and Faust in vain repenting . . . 
Ah, then the hardest-hearted breast is won ! 

But gone is opera, gone the rows of heads, 

Gone music, singers. For I see a chamber 
With pretty things and one divine who beds 

Herself with grief. Thought, thought, where wilt 
thou clamber ? 

Take all — songs, dames, and sights and sounds in bil- 
low — 

All, all, to smoothe one tossed and tear-stained pillow ! 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 159 


XIX 

Demons and ghouls that ravage hapless lands 
On states disjointed pour like desert sands 
And lassitude and faintness, aches and pains 
Rise when the part without its comrade stands. 

O oneness of the sphere that was divided, 

A goal thou art by purblind souls derided ; 

Prate on of free-will, bargains, goods and chattels ; 
Long, long ago the Law our case decided ! 

Ere man was man, woman and he were one, 
Through common veins the life-bloods creep and run, 
Wise Time who loves to cleave the one in two 
Knits the same web the pristine marriage spun. 


Small brains the chargers of the sun would guide 
And teach the moon a better path to glide 
Nor fear to meddle with a brittle glass — 

The love that lovers radiate from their side. 


The redman’s wizard to the pain applies 
His lips assured that comfort in them lies : 

Why are not we two dwellers of the plains ? 
My heart is firm. My mouth to heal you cries. 


160 Love Poems of Loins Bar naval 

Would not the slow touch of a worshipper 
On feet and brow the balm of peace confer ? 

Ah, from your sweet flesh all the ghouls to ban 
With kisses cruciform and fresh as myrrh ! 


XX 

I worship three ways, upward, side to side 
And to and fro ; and if a fourth extension 

Inheres in things within this world descried 
I worship likewise in that fourth dimension. 

But what ! there is a fourth dimension, showing 
Neither in lines nor cubes nor surfaces ! 

You catch it in the eyes of violets blowing, 

You know it in the silent souls of trees. 

O fourth dimension thou art Love, a land 

Most talked of and least trodden. From thy garden 

Circe the ruck of beasts who scoff has banned 
And nevermore will these thy lovers pardon. 


XXI 

Speak, velvet robe, meandering dark and smoothly 
By curves most tender, cool and virgin-lined, 

Are you so sombre for that doubts uncouthly 
Will dim the brow that walls a serious mind ? 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 161 

Ho, little ripple at the throat, where lace 
Throws coquetry on what should glisten fairly ! 

Aha, wee smiles about the wrists that race — 

Laugh out, ye flowers, and ride your wavelets rarely ! 

For ye bewitch me threefold with your grace : 

The solemn ground forebodes the grave and true 
When smile and frown dispute her rose-leaf face — 

But ye, O blooms, the joy of her relenting ! 

Then let me, robe in luck, confess to you 
What I have dared to dream, I unrepenting : 


Receive from me upon your silken pile 
The longing from my heart’s core’s soul that rises, 
Drink in its essence well and firm the while 
You hedge her modesty from rude surprises ; 

Transfuse it gently like the influence rare 
Of perfume subtler than a thought of ether ; 

Steep her therein from ripe-corn-tassel hair 
To gentle feet, O breathe upon that breather 

Of heavenly breaths my wish that may not brave 
Articulate speech but fills this desperate pressure 
And whispers you the meaning of my care ; 

Such kind reception me henceforth may save 
From years of loneliness and slow despair — 

Tell her, smooth box, that holds my hope and treasure ! 


1 62 Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 


XXII 

A mariner worn dumb with sleety gales, 

Dogged and grim with travail of the sea, 

Before a harbor loops aloft his sails 

And rows ashore through the green surf to see 

If tidings lurk for him in foreign mails 

And as his tarry, awkward thumbs will tremble, 

Shuffling the letters, lest the keen sight fails 

To note one script, nor can he care dissemble, 

So, dream of women, I enduring long 
The seas of anguish for your suffering, 

Trembled at each new batch the mail would fling 

Of fateful letters till at last with song 

Unspoke, yet surging through my heart, was spied 

The script of her for whom so oft I cried ; 


For whom so oft I cried in voiceless woe 
Sending my poor prayer through the alien gulf, 
Poor naked prayer that sought with aspect low 
To please the hostile dwelling as the wolf 
Is humbly passed by lambs that dread their foe ! 
Then through the coal-black chamber it would steal 
To plant on feverish lips a dewy seal 
And breathe fresh courage on your tortured brow. 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

For you are mine ! Who else has aught to say 
When we have joined in rapture, side to side, 
Bosom to bosom ? when one goal alway 

Beckons us both and we apart abide 
Content a little — then together rush 
To wait not hopeless for the grave’s cool hush ? 


XXIII 

The very pavement sleeps, no echo jars 
The rigid walls, there broods a dreamy haze 
Within the network of the city trees, 

Deep in the dark nestle the flocks of stars ; 

Melts into dream the moon o’er cloudy bars 
Whereon the townshine slumbers, then one sees 
A sombre house-front gashed with light that flees 
Mysterious, leaving on the black no scars. 

And we, lone watchers in a dormitory 
Gigantic, whose vast breathing comes and goes 
Deep like your sigh, rehearse the eternal story ; 

The while my arms, a rough sheath for a rose 
So fragrant, seek to warm against the hoary 
Assaults of time a love that laughs at snows. 


163 


164 Love Poems of Loins Bar naval 

We only sleep not from the restlessness 
Of love. Ah love unquiet, never done 
With thirst for more than rightfully is won, 

What curse is yours that from the close caress 
You slip away sans warning, sans redress ? 

Eternal conflict that must ever run 

’Twixt man and woman ere our joy ’s begun, 

That cheats the more, the more it seems to bless 1 

For I approach not your ideal man 

Pictured long since, him that is strong and true, 

My breast will never fill his hero-span 

Nor brain discover just your way to woo : 

All faults are mine since first the world began — 
And you ? 

XXIV 

If you were perfect I should love you less 
Although perchance more purely : 

Think you I ask that never worldly stress 
Shall try your courage with a fierce excess 
Or boast that you do naught if not demurely ? 

To love you noblest I would mark in you 
Of many a war the traces 
Wherefrom you’ve risen as conquering and as true 
As sun that freshly paints the vivid blue 

When off the sky a wrack of cloud he chases. 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 165 

And as in gardens men will tend an herb 
Of most exquisite savor 
Trailed under foot or growing too superb, 

So should my tenderness be prop or curb 
To your too weak or too intense endeavor. 

To bear with you, to laugh and weep, to sin — 

There is no higher mission ! 

What care we for the heights there are to win 
So the twin courage warm our hearts within 
To strive by hill and valley toward fruition ? 

Dull were Niagara and his plunge to me 
Without his grand emotion, 

His waste of spray and foam, his boiling sea 
Of storm-tossed rapids drawn relentlessly, 

Glad and yet frightened to the deep green ocean ! 


XXV 

What art is yours, woman of rounded limbs, 

That lets a sudden pallor make a cheat 
Of all your rose ? For know, right well I weet 
You’ve cared for me as for a bud that swims 
In leafy pool a little from your feet, 

Whereto you lean and with an outstretched wand 
Draw the odd blossom to your jewelled hand 
In hopes to find it for its hour sweet. 


1 66 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

It were not strange, woman whose long kiss mads, 
If then a chance-come slipping of the foot 
Should fright you white. But what may be the art 

That drives your blood against your frozen heart ? 

I am, alas, no magic lotus root 
To drag you to me in the lily-pads ! 


XXVI 

So proud am I since you my mouth did praise, 

So proud, my lips at all your sisters curl. 

Was’t pretty skill a bar thereby to raise 
’Twixt me and every woman, wife or girl ? 

For these my lips henceforth may never touch 

Others save two that praised them overmuch. 

It seemed an outburst of unconscious truth, 

Love’s truth, that praising. Surely ’twas no mock ? 

Yet from that hour no fool, to tell you sooth, 

Ere dreamed so silly o’er a cherished lock : 

O cruel might, lodged in a word and smile 

That could hard reason from her seat beguile ! 

Must you enwrap me in a selfish cloak 
Whereof the web is, Am I now at best ? 

And woof composed of some such thought, unspoke, 
As, Of her eyes how shall I stand the test ? 

Though mere a fool before I worshipped you, 

Wise through your love, I now am foolish too. 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 167 

No, no, ’tis false, no folly e’er was taken 

From your sad eyes and strangely parting lips ! 
Your force is such that you the laws have shaken 
That bind mankind. At touch of finger-tips 
The meanest things than jewels dearer are ; 

The mouth you praise outshines the evening star. 


XXVII 

Happy day, nay, not so fleet, 

Rest you here a little while ! 

Happy day, before you flutter 

O’er the green square, down the street, 

Wait, do wait, till I can utter 

Joyous thoughts that may your flight beguile. 

Happy day, are you made sweet 
By your quickness, that so fast 
You must fly from those who love ? 

Fear you that too long a treat 
Makes us weary at the last ? 

Linger here till we the same disprove. 

Happy day, I see you gliding 
Gently off before my say, 

Hola, happy day, I tell you fairly 
What I can with no deciding 
Pro or con, I’ll tell you squarely 
What in you was sweetest, happy day. 


1 68 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

First your birth : O whence procure, 

Happy day, your dewy lock ? 

The earth is old, yet childhood babbling 
Has not eyes more sinless-pure — 

But delay you will not brook ! 

Just one fly’s flight — and I stop my gabbling ! 

Do you mind you, in the morn, 

Of the swamp-lot’s mysteries ? 

Happy day, the flower there 
In the heart of a gnarly thorn ? 

Ah, you spied it ? ’twas too fair 
And you fled before its witcheries. 

Well then, come, I thank you first 
That you rose behind my back ; 

Always westward to one dwelling 
Stands my face and when you burst, 

From her roof the dark compelling, 

Who fled fast along your sparkling track ? 

Happy day, a moment, prithee ; 

Thank you for your strong hot noon ! 

Never could she dare that heat, 

But I crept, accomplice with thee, 

Through gold shadows her to meet . . . 

Whose fault, naughty day, the swoon ? 

Listen to my thanks, glad day, 

Ere you sweep about your skirts 
Orange, purple, red, maroon, 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 121 

Bends the deep sleeping sky ! And I to frown 
Against her brows and join, forsooth, the crowd 
Of whining grumblers and my lifework shroud 
With hampering coils, a brainsick, lovelorn clown ! 

0 sky gray-blue, affectionate to me 

As the deep mother’s-look I ne’er shall see, 

More beautiful than one who has no shame 

Of the poor friendless one to make a game, 

1 kneel, I hear. These lips henceforth shall be 
Forever sealed against her traitorous name ! 


xxxvi 

An oval board, silver, great heaps of flowers, 
Bright glances, tender bosoms, brilliant dresses, 
Wine of four hues, a score of savory messes, 

A Babel of talk that up to the ceiling towers, 

Then, all at once — your name ! As when the dashes 
Of wind and hail are thick in stormy showers 
But through the midst a bolt of thunder crashes 
And in suspense hang all the cosmic powers — 

So came the name a stranger spoke in praise ; 

And while I forced a trembling dull reply 
Striving to shake myself from my amaze 
6 


122 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

A little choir of angels in a sky 

Within my brain began a glorious hymn : 

The sea of despond then I learned to swim. 


The sea of despond then to swim I learned, 

And inward swore that numbing stroke of wave, 
Nor blinding spray, nor scale-clad living grave, 

Nor foaming gulfs that hidden reefs have churned 
Should stay me from the purpose that abides 
Your life to own, your spirit to oppress, 

Your will to curb until the last caress 
Which in the fiercest woman’s love resides 

Should find me out and make you slave indeed 
Kneeling before your master ! Do your will, 

Be false, be true ; set forth your female skill, 

Let love or anger in your bosom breed, 

I am resolved to have you, soon or late ; 

By hook or crook I am to be your mate ! 

XXXVII 

When first in all your glory 
You broke upon my vision 
Something like pain shot through my startled breast, 
Let not my simple story 
Rashly arouse derision 
But wait till you, tossed by a like unrest, 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 123 

Feel your own life oppressed. 

As flowers droop all at once 
In the strong hour of blooming 
Midmost the wildwood’s gloaming 
When the axe bares them to their lord’s face, the sun’s, 
So was my boldness fled 
So did I hang the head 

So did my choking heart drain from my cheeks the red. 


XXXVIII 

To sit beside you and reach out no hand ; 

To touch your dress, and give a frozen stare ; 

To speak, and frame an accent cool and bland ; 

To hear your voice and not kneel down in prayer ! 
Hell’s not so bad as that, for there despair 
Foams, shrieks, and gnashes, tears itself to win 
Some active respite from the pangs of sin 
And memories of the cool, seabreezy air. 

But we . . . that civilization which has taught us 

To hide our love has not yet thither reached 
Where people stop before they’re cold and rude. 

Here, in the snarl our boasted culture’s wrought us, 
We die before our selfish pride’s impeached : 

We think the words, I love you, far too crude. 


124 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 


xxxix 

Above the clink of knives and din, 

The babble of words at random flung 
And stealthy shuffle of men that bear the strange new 
covers in 

I hear a voice that once has rung 
A passionate carol through my veins 
And at the sound I lose the phrase that falters on my 
tongue. 

To hold my fork 1 am at pains : 

A silver floe with silver isles 

Tall, crowned with fruits and flowers — a view where she 
alone remains. 

Though here be phrases, honied smiles, 

Indifference, ardor, truth and lies, 

I only see the face I swore was far too pure for wiles. 

One look ! Before the sunset dies 
A gazer sees a semblance blurred 

On every side and with my sight it fares not otherwise. 

She is so radiant, so unstirred ! 

Could hers have been the billowy hair 

That flowed, a Msenad mane of love, all at a little word ? 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 125 

’Twas not on mine that dewy pair 

Finer than pearls in her necklace lay . . . 

No, no ; some deeps in memory’s tide ’tis treason to un- 
bare ! 

On eyes her liquid glances play 

As bows on cellos and her form 

The nerve-harp strikes like organ-tones where cardinals 
kneel to pray. 

She emanates electric storm, 

Her graces are like fragrances 

And at her lips audacious shapes of wit and wisdom 
swarm. 

I most was warm when she would freeze 

And when she smiled I least would please ; 

Now, for the smallest crumb of hope, I’d bless her on 
my knees. 


XL 

To hear, not from, but of you — that is bitter, 

Yet know you love me after all a little ! 

To leave me, yet exact the jot and tittle 
Of love’s whole fealty while your comrades titter ! 

He you love more than any other shivers 

Out in the cold ; yet you to smile are willing 
On men you scorn, on men you would be killing 
With slow contempt . . . How your fine nostril 

quivers ! 


126 Love Poems of Loins Barnaval 

Why not have done ? Forsooth, because it tickles 
Your mood no other maid shall hear me wooing ! 
Yourself you give not ; and shall none, undoing 
Her gates, wipe off the foolish tear that trickles ? 

Back, base-born thought from cells of matter sprung, 

I would not, if I could, be a forgetter, 

But I shall wear without a plaint my fetter 
Till faith and strength and bravery right from my 
wrong have wrung. 

XLI 

I might not rest till I refreshed mine eyes : 

Lo, in the funeral train how pale you stand ! 

A jet-black dress close to your figure lies, 

A mighty sadness holds you in its hand ; 

A lock of gold the crape vail open pries 
Till in the church it needs no magic wand 
You to a rare black tulip to transmute 
Whose golden heart dreams of a heavenly fruit. 

So pale ? for whom ? for that good hoary man 
Gathered in peace to friends long gone before ? 
Speak to me from the shadows ! Are you wan 
Because, because I come to you no more ? 

Do you regret a little ? Hear me ! Can 
Hope like a wrestler cast doubt to the floor ? 
Alas, I know not for whose face you sigh, 

Nor do I care, so it can not be I. 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 12 7 

XLII 

Not by one chant are famous songsters known, 
Landscapes are lauded not for one sole charm 
And separate breaths of cooling zephyrs blown 
But parch us more while steady gales from harm 
Of fiery suns protect ; among the swarm 
Of glittering fry how few to size have grown ! 

A thousand sheep of a Nevada farm 
Survive when snowdrifts overwhelm the one. 

Could I amass in one concentrate whole 
The thoughts of you I scatter through the day 
And could I hit the vital heart and Pole 

Of that wide sphere which secret ponderings build, 
Then had I found the word and way to say 
With what incarnate love my soul is filled. 

XLIII 

I care not for the future. ’Tis enough 
That you allow me by your side to sit. 

Bliss like to this makes me for long months fit 
The world to insult and answer harsh with rough. 

I, like Antaeus, find in you my earth 
And universal strengthener of my life, 

A mine of thoughts, a sea of sombre mirth, 

A cure for madness and a rest from strife. 

At your dear side I seem a maiden coy, 

My tongue gone lame with overweening joy. 


128 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 


XLIV 

What words I speak within my heart 
When I’m alone 

Are fit to employ the illumer’s art 

Or his who graves on stone — 

So sad, so warm, so poignant-sweet are they, 
The fragrant words which to my heart I say. 

The words, ah, those upon my tongue 
When you are by 

Are juice from starveling apples wrung, 

Spray where the spring runs dry — 
Ah, who shall guess what rivers understay 
The marsh of words which to your face I say ! 


XLV 

Against the bloom-tipped waves of woman heads 
And hedges black of fair-haired men in rows 
The dazzling sheen that every footlight sheds 
Prints on a living ground your quiet pose, 

Your neck, the subtle line of lip and nose 
Made sad and harmless by an eye that dreads 
Some coming woe, great antelope eye that spreads 
Its startled shadows through translucent brows ! 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 129 

These bear so hard on my assailed senses 
I fain would shout to break the enwrapping charm, 
The peace of yonder thousand glittering glances 

I fain would snap with one quick war-alarm 
Or, would we might in some dim hushed alcove 
Sob out with Lucca’s voice our close and speechless 
love ! 


XLVI 


Who knows but that when we are dead 
These lines as deep shall buried lie, 

Who knows, some words of that now said 
From scribbled heaps shall chance to cry ? 
Who knows but from oblivion’s bed 

Some one shall care these rhymes to pry — 
They like the Mexic calendar-stone 
Shall fame confer on you alone. 

Rough though the calendar-stone, it frames 
Strange lore of skies and bygone races ; 
Secret by secret man reclaims 

The meanings lost of hideous faces, 
Star-wheels and rings, at last redeems 
The Indian past from low disgraces ; 

So shall a future age refit 
My love from out oblivion’s pit. 

6 * 


13 o Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 


XLVII 

I saw you last night with these eyes although 
Betwixt us rose and fell with stormy moan 
The Ocean. By its mimic brink alone 
I stood ; around me listeners lolled in row ; 

And when, a great beast with a single soul, 

The orchestra would flash Briareus arms 
Now up, now down — o’er the wild music stole 
Your white face whiter from approaching harms. 

Andromeda forlorn ! O hapless love, 

Victim self-bound by Mammon’s brackish sea. 

How pale you sit freezing me from above, 

Me, a poor Perseus who in agony 

Sans wings, sans sword, must watch the deadliest crime 
Man wreaks on man in hopes to baffle time. 

XLVIII 

It is your sex which causes all my woe, 

Your sex defensive, always up in arms 
Against my ventures, for its restless fears 
Bank and abatis ’gainst my friendship throw. 

O that you were a man ! for then alarms 
Would turn to close-knit amity, no shears 
Of Fate should snap ; and so, along the vale 
Of lengthening years together we should sail. 


Love Poe77is of Louis Bcir7iaval 13 1 

How can a man love woman ? Is there not 
Always a contest, always some reserve ?• 

Is, through her sex, a woman not a lie ? 

You are so nearly man — what cruel lot 

Was that which made the hand that shaped you swerve ? 

You, being hurt, utter no woman’s cry 

And your indifference has a mannish calm, 

Yet over you Venus has poured her balm. 

How easily the old time poets used 

To weave their sensuous rhymes around their loves ! 

Tropes, metaphors came marshalling out in droves, 

Nor once their mighty Romance tongues refused 
To mould the glorious phrases which amused 
And softened all their hearers. It behoves 
Me too a rugged but most copious tongue 
To shape in verses, shall be learned and sung ; 

But I, alar, am too unhappy, long 
To tarry o’er the smoothing of a verse, 

Nor have I time to ponder on my lines : 

I can but jot me down a mournful song 
Which, after years, some lover may rehearse 
Who like me hurries and like me repines ; 

The beast of burden in his struggling years 
Finds time for little sport and fewer tears. 

Those ancient poets stretched themselves at ease 
In trellised arbors on the flowery grass 
Under the cypress or the olive trees 
To sing the sweet perfections of some lass 


132 Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 

With all the skill and learning which would please 
Spirits elect, hi'gh o’er the laboring mass : 

Queens, princes, bishops were at hand to applaud 
Each quaint and beautifully concocted fraud. 

For frauds they were. Those poets had their wives 
Children and friends about their happy knees, 

And that is why as in their busy hives 
Bees fashion honey they confected these 
Fine scholarly old measures. So their lives 
Which sprang from genius grew, to spreading trees 
Of perfect letters. Ah, but you know, lover 
Not all their polish can the love frauds cover ! 

Yet would I still devote my empty days 
To build to love in rhymes a classic tomb 
But that each week I fly a hundred ways 
A thousand things to do ; I go ; I come ; 

I palpitate with the gold -hunter’s craze 
And curse my gold when I have brought it home 
And in this dry, remorseless atmosphere 
Grow white and thin with many a bootless fear. 

Perhaps I err ; perhaps I were unable 
To weld my verses into forms of grace ; 

Perhaps this mind is so grief-worn, unstable, 
Though I should cease my silly fortune’s chase 
I could not touch them. In the hoary fable 
Where hare with tortoise runs a losing race 
Pm with the hare ! Give the base turtle all — 

For though he win the prize, he still must crawl ! 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 133 


XLIX 

I ponder o’er this hand wherein the stars 
Have drawn the chart of my succeeding days. 

I stare : however steadfastly I gaze — 

Where runs a line which no bad fortune mars ? 
The line of fate meanders through a maze 
Of broken hopes and joy-dispelling bars, 

The path of love is spoiled by hateful jars 
Of mind and ruddy points that hint of craze. 

The palm is generous but fickle, crossed 
By zigzag marks portending evil things, 

It is with loves, ambitions, doubts embossed, 

’Tis all of earth, and yet has trace of wings. 
But still one joy remains, O dreary token ! 

The mid point of the line of life is broken. 


But what wrote they, the all too-truthful stars, 
Within the smooth white palm of her I praise ? 

What do their subtile darkness-splitting rays 
Inscribe therein with careless-seeming scars 
Before she learns her infant arm to raise, 

Before her close-clinched fingers she unbars ? 

’Twas written then how fierce her scorn should blaze 
And anger smoulder till herself it chars ; 


134 Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 

Twas then they sealed her to be Mammon’s child. 

Man cannot fight with fate. Ten sighs or groanings, 

Twenty, a thousand, ’tis of little weight ; 

Whether we fall to laughter or to moanings 

The awful wheels we never can placate. 

Despair ? It is a drug that makes not wild, but mild. 

L 

In dreams among the hills, 

The haunt of woodland rills, 

Two lonely lakes once glimmered side by side. 
One, clear as amber, drew 
Against her heart the blue 
And showed as lovely and as pure a tide. 

The other oft with dust 
From willows or with gust 
Of wind-storm blackened or in tumult lay, 

Or else within arose 
The atom plant that blows 
A turbid bloom throughout the waters gray. 

And though that lake, I ween, 

Longed for the fairy sheen 
Of her the princess, his companion bright, 

For fear his wave should foil 
Her crystal wave and soil 
He grieved and lingered in his own despite. 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 135 

But O, the dream that craves 
To rise with stress of waves 
And drown the barriers that his love withhold ! 

To cast upon her breast 
His heart in foam, and rest 
Deep within deep and blissful fold in fold ! 

Those lakes unhappy stay 
And lonely till the day 
Of terror when the earth and heavens run 
Together like the vault 
Where metals fine are smalt, 

When life is worthless, for of hope is none — 


Then from their foolish sleep 
The lakes together leap 

And kiss and merge and mingle core with core ; 
Chiding with sighs and tears 
The grief of bygone years — 

Then laugh, then weep, then vow to part no more ! 


LI 

The ooze that beats against your pane, 
This night of mournful sound, 

It folds a cloak of inky stain 
My shuddering limbs around. 


136 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

Where lamps like ruby glow-worms creep 
The streets all up and down 

I wander like a man asleep 

Whom thorns in slumber crown. 

I reach the door. The tempest flaps 
Its wet wings in my face ; 

Your lights are quenched ; my feeble taps 
Away the storm-winds chase. 

0 if you knew that one caressed 
How tenderly stood there, 

Say, would you take me to your breast 
And banish my despair ? 

Or would you, pitiless and rude, 

Still urge the frown and sneer? 

To-night I am so meek of mood 
Meseems that death is near. 

1 only want, ere I am laid 
Prone in the quiet mold, 

To feel just once my winsome maid 
Her arms about me fold. 

My little maid, whose plot it was 
To spend long years with me — 

O forenoons that as hours would pass ! 

O chamber filled with glee ! 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 137 

Though I be dead your breath I’ll feel, 

Your bosom soft I’ll know, 

To my stiff lips a smile shall steal, 

My cheeks with red shall glow. 

There in my straight bed I shall lie 
With palms close-joined in prayer 
Until you come to rest me by 
And heal my long despair. 


LII 

You will not die though she has left you, fool, 

But live right onward, drink, laugh, eat, wake, sleep, 
Do everything except to sigh and weep, 

You’ll spend your time by compass and by rule ; 

Still will you sell for most and purchase cheap, 

Still strain to lead in the world’s childish school, 
Through basenesses for money you will creep, 
Another woman make of you her tool ; . . 

No, no, not that ! it cannot be ; for why 
Should I so far forget the golden past ? 

I am not bestial that I need be mated ; 

Let the revolving years run slow or fast, 

Let them with every infamy come freighted, 

Her throne shall not be filled while I am I. 


138 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 


LIII 

You do not love him ! O, you need not hide 
Your face in smiles, for I have second sight ; 

In vain you simulate, for not more wide 
Is darkness from the light, 

Is earth from heaven apart 

Than an affection which is brain from that which is the 
heart. 

Ay, had we met among the stilted throng, 

Seen and regarding, conscious, firmly nerved, 

Where lights and custom braved us both along, 

Then you had never swerved 
Then I had never seen 

The look of misery in the place where passion once has 
been. 

O dreary gulf, toward which with obstinate 
Unnatural haste a suicide you press ! 

Souls of your stamp unwisely when they mate 
Are stags, an angry stress, 

Are wild stags which a shock 

Knits by the antlers with a turn that death will not 
unlock. 

You have the dying stag’s look in your eyes, 

The hunted, you ; the dogs and hunter, you ! 

Nor on us twain — be witnesses, O skies — 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 139 

The worst of crimes you do, 

The crime that springs from whim ! 

You sow the seed of wretchedness for souls to come — 
and him. 


LIV 

And shall I never know the reasons plain, 
Why you discarded me and him did marry ? 
Was it that poverty’s too fierce a strain ? 

Or did you fear unwedded still to tarry 
Lest at the last you should accept my suit 
And so your plans of goody life miscarry ? 

Or did you treat me as you would a brute 
That’s well to play with but not keep at home, 
A bitter tasted but not ugly fruit 

That ornaments the garden where you roam 

Bearing no more relation to your life 

Than bears the steamer to the light sea foam ? 

O men will scream when the slow-moving knife 
Tears at the surface, but there comes no cry 
When to the hilt the sudden blade they drive, 

And so I can most calmly, stifling sigh, 

Groan or fierce word, railing or stern contempt, 
Measure the wretched shipwreck where I lie. 


140 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

For at the blow I felt at once exempt 
From any feeling good, bad, bright or dreary, 

Till all seems now only a horror dreamt ; 

I will not say that I am not most weary ; 

Nothing in heaven and earth exists, I fear, 

So utterly lone as I, so lost, so eerie 

With strength left only at my poor self to sneer ! 


LV 

Over the roofs in search of your new home 
I stare in vain across the smoky town 
And from my beard the raindrops trickle down 
Soak through my breast and to my warm heart come 
From inmost chambers heat and life to drown 
And cause a void that hurts and harms me more 
Than blow or wound, than groan or wailing sore, 
Whereof the outmark is a whitening crown. 

Since you, unhappy, in wicked haste were married 
The sea of roofs, harsh, without one green shore, 

Of my existence is the symbol drear. 

How the dull maze of buildings can I clear ? 

Each street yawns deep and cavernous and horrid. 
Life is too hard. Think ! just a leap— ’tis o’er. 


Love Poems of Loztis Bar naval 


LVI 

It is not come, that joyful day 
When souls no longer foolish be, 
When those that love shall never stray 
Or fly the bonds will make them free. 


O, had it come, we were not now 
Severed by God and man, ay, worst, 
Severed by hatred and the vow 

That maddened me, your nature cursed. 

Why see our lives when all too late, 
Unscale our eyes when seeing ’s pain ? 
Why groan, why writhe and cry on fate ? 
No herb can make us whole again. 


LVII 

I am so tired of all the ceaseless round 
Of food and sleep and work and gabble, 

I drag my feet like some one who is mired 
And speeches of old friendship have the sound 
Of the base windy rabble ; 

I am so tired ! 


142 Love Poems of Lotus Barnaval 

I am so worn with following a dream 
That scarce I keep my bones together. 

Of men of sense I am the butt and scorn, 

I know they mock when furtive eyeballs gleam ; 
My life has broke its tether ; 

I am so worn ! 

I am so cold in marrow and in brain 

That mockery warms me ; for I know that scoffers 

Sneer to conceal the scars of combats old, 

Are ignorant, poor souls, or else they feign ; 

I care no more if good or evil offers, 

I am so cold ! 


LOUIS BARNAVAL 


PAR T III 











































Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 

Leave me to the evening’s gray ; 

Praise well-earned no person hurts ; 

If you scorn me, I shall sing the moon. 

Thanks in fine for this that now 
One spot brightened by your rays 
Forms a saintly aureole 
Round her homestead like a brow — 

Day most gay in part and whole, 

First, but O, not last of happy days ! 


XXVIII 

Three tall cedars guard her dreams, 
Wardens three, 

Past their leaves the river gleams 
Nigh as fresh as her eyebeams, 
Nigh as bright 

Where the sun shines as the free 
Chestnut' curls behind her throat ; 
Fair yachts on the tideway float, 
Her head rides in light. 

Three tall cedars murmur low, 
Chide their fate, 

‘ Men and waters come and go, 
Winds about her lattice blow, 
Flowers are sweet, 

Boats may hold her precious freight 
8 


169 


170 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

Senseless stuffs her beauties wrap, 
Blossoms touch her sacred lap, 

Vines embrace her feet.’ 

Three tall cedars make their moan : 

‘ Those are fond ; 

Fixed for aye are we alone, 

Our stiff branches upward grown 
Cannot yearn 

Toward our princess, break the bond, 
Whelm her with our leafy showers ; 
Peacocks raise their gold-eyed bowers 
When love’s torches burn/ 

Three tall cedars when I heard 
Whispering sad, 

Full of woe I took the word 
4 Cedars tall, ’tis well to gird 
At your fate, 

Yet mine own is worse than mad, 

For I walk, yet may not to her, 
Though I knock, she’ll not undo her 
Door though midnight wait/ 


XXIX 

O gold-cup moon, brimm’d high with generous wine, 
Pour, pour on her your wealth 
Of amorous health, 

On her I call, but with what folly, mine ! 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval j 7 1 

O thyme-steeped wind, with your fine feathery broom 
For rare new perfumes seek 
Each hidden creek 

And sweep them through her cool and shadowy room ! 

O treacherous tide swirling along the cove, 

From China spices rare 
And rich silks bear 

To cast them at the feet of her I love ! 

O fringing trees that sing to her in sleep, 

Stretch, stretch your green nets wide 
On every side 

And seize miasmas that should near her creep ! 

O bashful feet and foolish trembling hands, 

Be firm, be hardy each 
To aid his speech 

When next her lover by his true love stands ! 

O stammering tongue which each warm word outstrips, 

O timorous heart that now like dolphin dips, 

What though ye fail to serve ? 

There still is nerve 

For one mute passionate pleading of the lips. 

XXX 

I may not tell thee all the love I feel 
Nor may I to myself allow 
The full insanity which thou 
In this poor brain canst with thy breath instil. 


172 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

With uttering of it all were at an end, 

For to my speech such force must go 
No strength were left to live with ; so 
Some only-once-flared meteor were thy friend. 

What though to see me in the socket flame 
Should fill thy heart with fierce delight ? 
Beware, lest love with unawaited might 
Thee and thy calm soul should forever maim. 


XXXI 

By lilac clouds, you crooked golden wire 

That faintly hint where the wide moon must hide, 

Why mind me this sad evening of a pride 

That plays demure and towers the while the higher ? 

Just so she turns her hid face pure as fire 

One line’s breadth more till I have reached her side ; 

But when, alas ! her glorious grace should bide 

Full on my face her anger is most dire. 

Gold edge of moon, cold and of mystic power, 

At whose warm full the flower of love shall blow, 
You do not mock, even you must mellow at last, 

But Arctic frosts on my poor buds are cast . . . 

Sharp sacrificial knife, in this pale hour 

Can you not flash from heaven and lay me low ? 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 


XXXII 

Safe in the vantage of her harbored state 
She rides at ease, but I must bear the stress 
Of outer storms, the waves unkind caress 
And our most harsh unequalness of fate ; 

Yet may’t not form, my lading of strong freight 
Joined to the rarefound virtues she doth hold, 
The alembic mystic, finer than fine gold, 

That only grows when ardent lovers mate ? 

She will not run her ensign to the peak 
Nor signal to me how to cross the bars, 

She will not spread her dainty wings by night 

To meet halfway, unite in one delight 
With yards enlocked, and so one haven seek 
Favored by magic from the double stars. 


XXXIII 

And must I feign and must I strain my heart, 
Turn cool aside when I would leap to her, 
Play a mean gamut with a sordid art 
And cheat, that her cool pulses shall but stir ? 


174 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

0 Love ! then love’s a staple of the mart 
That has no root and lives a life of chances 
Where scarcity its wretched cost enhances — 

* Yon heap is vile — but rush to buy that quart.* 

1 will not chaffer and degrade us both, 

I will not counterfeit the careless air 

That dries my blood to powder. Rather be 

The polar winter of a pure despair 
Apart, alone ! Rather, the last time, see 
In tears hope vanish gay- winged in the south ! 


xxxiv 

Future and past and things of now 
Beyond us twain had sunk away 
We asked not who nor where nor how, 
When, by what right ; there was to say 
That she and I were — nothing more. 

Did not the touch of hers repay 
My thin hand well and dry-dust core 
Of thirsty longing throb sweet pain ? 

So, while we wandered toward the shore 
Still crept one thought along the brain : — 
‘ My lost and found, my lotus bud 
Some demon’s power below the main 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

Once dragged from pure air to the mud, 
Behold us met, and who knows why ? 

How came we hither ? fancies scud 

Through the poor memory’s cloudy sky. 
Come, where the smooth and dazzling sand 
Cools chin in sea-foam we will lie 
And loose from love each prudish band ! ’ 

She spoke no word, sweet was her smile, 
Not weak but vague ; her little hand 
Did surely press my arm, the while 
We reached the shore, and lo, a throng 
Of youth at play in gay defile 
To silence did a sudden wrong. 

Then back we turned to pass between 
Sheer gates of rock the stream along 
That ribboned down a vast ravine. 

There crag on crag, gray, ruddy, pearl 
Or purple-red or saffron-green, 

Soared straight on high or rode the swirl. 

I felt her long breath shake my frame. 

Is passion so ? Or is the girl 

Thus artless ? Hollow came her name : 

* O here, my essence of desires, 

My world, my duty, God and fame, 

How soft within this gorge expires 
The long hot draining kiss of pain ! 

In amorous aromatic fires 

The dragon-fly himself has slain, 

His rustle stilled, no sound is heard 
Save hush of water through the plain.* 


175 


176 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

But to her lips rose never a word ; 

We saw the holm that splits the flood 
And see, on iris-bannered sward 
A joyous round of kindred stood 
Or lay bloom-heaped about the grass ! 

Then shamed and desperate of mood 
I strode right on to find a pass 

Through which the brown hills forest-crowned 
Smiled fair ; how far more fair she was ! 

She brushed, a candid shape, the ground, 

Her tireless feet in modish shoon ; 

Her garb was trim and hair smooth-bound, 
Calm was her face as harvest moon, 

Nor stone her stayed, nor brier held. 

But I ? a harsh voice out of tune 

And ragged garb and eyes compelled • 

To set their madness on her face. 

Would words gain substance, sworn or yelled ? 
I could not ; onward was the pace, 

Hers even, mine a drunken reel. 

At last we came to some high place, 

A saw of trees : ‘ Ah here I feel 

How cedarn wine of strong hope slips 
Within my veins ! for woe or weal 
Now part those firm and luscious lips ! * 

But ere might come the thirsted sound, 

As loom through solid fog the ships, 

Upsprang a peopled pile from ground 
And stared us through with myriad eyes. 

Then touched by wrath I faced around ; 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

But fell that anger quick to rise ; 

One look at eyes of her, deep-set, 

Which said . . . ah, what? Nay, can surmise 

Be worse than those seared spots that fret 
The pupil ’neath her lizard lid 

As though hot steel the eyes had met, 
Chameleon eyes that ever bid 

Me come and come with opal change ? 

A charmed ring of fragrance slid 

From her calm form had closed its strange 
Dread band about a willing prey. 

Then far we left the spiky range 
And won o’er trackless moors a way 
To where young birches dip them steep 
Toward a dark tarn forever gray 

In brooding shades whereto you creep 
Through tunnelled yews of ghastly mien ; 

With damp the leafy arches weep. 

O there were kisses hot, I ween, 

On smooth cheeks, letting, but not mine ; 

And would God, then the leaves between 
Had death set there his final sign ! 

Now by the tarn no being breathed, 

But swung o’erhead too glittering eyne ; 

Between gray wings a brown hawk wreathed 
His trackless spell ; thick woods near by 
Of tall smooth trees whereunder seethed 
A cling-leaf soil made black the sky 
And blackest where a hollow nook 
Was underlit with ghastly high 
8 * 


1 77 


178 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

Straight flowers gray-white. These flame-like shook 
Their torchy heads and with a beam 
Of poisonous beauty filled the brook. 

She smiled as one who loves her dream. 

Then closely round luxurious lined 

Smooth limbs and frame parched members gleam 
And dry lips to their fountain wind : 

‘ Ay, here’s the spot and now the hour 
O straight red mouth that mads the mind ! 

0 calm eyes of unholy power ! 

Here ends our path ; look, love-wan pyres 
Proclaim with many a torch the bower ; 

Bless me before the first expires ! ’ 

She undulated by my side, 

On me she turned the unburned fires 
Of those seared eyes nor yet replied ; 

Then spoke. Good God, she found a tongue 
That held no wrath nor tone of pride . . . 

What was ’t, as sinuous close she clung 
And in my eyes the world reeled red 
While sinking clotted leaves among ? . . . 

1 Remember, Sir, that I am wed.’ 


XXXV 

It was your mouth that so first wrought on me, 
Your red, fine mouth, no two days found alike, 
Now proudly gathered up for words that strike, 
Then fall’n in lines of softened ecstasy. 


Love Poems of Louis Barjzaval 179 

All day might pass, it still were heaven to see 
Closed lips like marshmallow flowers, vail the sight 
Of grace-anointed form and eyes that smite 
And laughing heal, that flash and stab and flee. 

Next, ah, your hand ! which, touching unawares, 

So shocks my blood with a tumultuous joy 
I barely know some powers my peace destroy 

And reason from me in a moment fares : 

But when near by your body’s warmth I feel 
And your sweet breath — do you not see me reel ? 

So harsh was I, you that shall never see 
These trifling lines, that morning gay and bright 
When we, approaching in what different plight, 

Stared, wondering, you — I dark and angrily ! 

How I did hate you while a happy bee 
Boomed deep content and madcap butterflies 
About us chased and danced at childish cries 
All down the leaf-walk, yes, and while the glee 
Of twig-swung birds that should have shamed me kind 

Wove in and out the formal tree-parade. 

But did you guess, O first my thought and last, 

How weak I turned when coldly we had passed, 

How black the sky was, how I groped as blind, 

How the changed bird-song made my brain afraid ? 

No ; nor shall this true hand bring your clear brow a 
shade. 


i8o Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

XXXVII 

Upon the stair, the narrow stair, 

A step, and lo, across my hair 
Steals something awesome like a hand, 

A windy hand from giant land ! 

It cannot be, it cannot be 
My spirit’s eyes the floating see 
Of some one’s robe and feet that stand 
Upon the stair ? 

Upon the stair, the narrow stair, 

The step not hers within my hair 
Thrills gently yet. But ah, I know 
A stranger mounts to trick me so ! 

Accursed graybeard, what has brought you, 
What evil meddling fiend has taught you 
Of some one’s robe the rustling low 
Upon the stair ? 

XXXVIII 

Now would she care, my lady far away, 

To know that down-hill where the maples talk 
And dips to rise the shadowy tree-hung walk 
One swaying spray of willow gives me stay ? 

Ay, would she care, though the mere outline balk 
My cheeks of blood, seeming in shades to mark 
Her dainty stride-swung garments white on dark, 
Then skim the hill deer-footed, stoop like hawk 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 181 

And only find my folly ? She might smile 
At silliness, then give a little sigh 
Of passing sadness and a tender look 

As pays a bookwright for a slight, sad book ; 

But she would start could my weak-chested cry 
Pierce with its choking grief through many a yawning 
mile. 


xxxix 

I must, I must behold you, or I die ! 

For one whole week have I not drowned my heart 
And somehow run, read, slept, worked, talked apart 
From actual life, nor uttered loud a sigh ? 

But now is surely some disaster nigh 

If sans warm breast and soul-o’erthrowing lips, 

Sans form’s and face’s delicate ellipse 
Another day in agony goes by ! 

For when most sunk in lethargy, behold, 

Your noble head half-drooping from a frame 
Looked out with such sad sweetness that off-rolled 

Hypocrisy like fumes ! But all the flame 
Of my unquenchable love for you, firm will, 

Burst with such fell heat forth, only your hand can still ! 


1 82 Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 


XL 

Before the elysium of your kiss 
I doubt if you appear 
And on the very peak of bliss 
Still thread the vale of fear. 


XLI 


It was the moon ; be sure it was the moon. 

I had not dared the balcony that night 

Save that I knew the maddening queen would soon 
Drop by the Orange mountains from the city’s sight. 

It was the moon ; think how the street lay black 

Gemm’d with star lamps where the green gardens 
slept ; 

Up the pure sky a hard-lined chimney stack 

Witch-painted wavering grew as downward still she 
crept. 

It was the moon ; you stood in thickest shade 

With head leaned back and white throat curved for 
bliss ; 

I, quaking with love smothered, was afraid 

To seal your grief-thrilled lips with a soul-easing kiss. 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 183 

Yes, ’twas the moon ; she filled your window-sash 
Witfi sudden glory, glanced and turned my brain. 
Woman, the moon’s dread power was in that flash : 

We bowed in long embrace to her transcendant 
reign. 


XLII 

The rosebright night you felt my fingers glide 
Across your waist to where twin lotus bloom, 

The night I kissed your round neck in the gloom 
Within what space two turned their heads aside, 
That night I could have sworn you were all mine, 
Forever mine ; through time our lives should stride 
Close knit as new and old moon side by side, 

And mingle white as seven-times hued sunshine. 


Bufe-by next noon the mirage far was scattered 
And love was whim and yielding but a sport, 

Your touch a friend’s, your tongue was love’s derid- 
ing .. . 


Good God, is’t so ? With falseness is no siding : 
Farewell, a wan knight issues from your court, 

His sword and true heart at your gateway shattered. 


184 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

XLIII 

I hate you with a slow and deadly hate 

That burns within the red walls of my heart ; 

I would not save you from the vilest fate 

But gladly sit and with your writhing sate 
The thirst for hate that of my soul is part. 

Traitor to love, who for your sport and whim 
Must egg me on to spill my soul on you ! 

Gave mt good hope and still more hope — no dim 

Or doubtful signs — that soul and mind and limb, 
Yourself, your all, were mine own, full and true ! 

And then to whine and steadfast love protest 
And draw the mask and shed those lizard tears ! 

Why not be bold ? why not, the truth confessed 

For just this once, unload your guilty breast 

And show the game you’ve played me all these years ? 

The game of have and eat your cake, the game 
Of pretty sighs, hand-pressures, starts and kisses, 

The sport of love without the people’s blame — 

A lover famished, fed upon a name 

And tortured by a thousand hoarded blisses ! 

You call that love ? ’Tis an ignoble mind 
Will not assist a starving man with gold. 

But what of her whom jewels could not blind 

Who doles her love ? too petty-souled to find 
A godlike joy in passions clear and bold ? 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 

I hate you, I lament you, I despise — 

As little a real woman as the flame 
You counterfeited has its spring and rise 
Aught deeper than your shifty-colored eyes : 
For womanhood with you is but a name. 


I will not call you monster but a boy, 

A cool-veined boy, nor man, nor woman grown 
Yet even boys grow warm for older blisses, 

As you shall find. O, when you thirst for kisses, 
May I be near to drink each fruitless moan ! 


XLIV 

Dare to be frank, O soul, 

Now that of mole-eyed night 
Fleeing the step of light 
Wimple and vail and gown 
Over the alien town 
Darker, more darkly roll. 

Why did you turn away — 

Night from the dayspring’s lance — 
From a true soul’s advance ? 

Why did you scorn the gem, 

Leave the pure fruit on stem 
For a mere toy of clay ? 


1 86 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

Why against right, with wrong 
Showed you, O strong one, love 
For the hawk, not the dove, 

Till the deep mother-dark 
Wearied of sigh and cark 
Breathed through unmanly song ? 


Hapless — and yet your fate 
Still were ungrateful, came 
Answer to that wry flame ! 
Songs ! Did they bring relief 
In that unsimple grief 
To your small bosom’s freight ? 


Forced by an inward bent, 
As toward a rent in walls 
Something a pale plant calls, 
So did you quit your ease : 
Now in the gale you freeze, 
Now is your summer spent. 


Why did you turn again ? 

Ask of the rain its law ; 

Why should the rose’s haw 
Spangle the snow-bound swamp ? 
Does the dark crimson lamp 
Of the wild rasp explain 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

Wherefore it glows unseen ? 
Gentians of queenly hue, 

Are ye of chance so blue ? 
Blackberry blossoms are white ; 
Read me one riddle aright : 

Why are the forests green ? 

Reason, be sure, for it all ; 

Yet in each fall there’s a breath 
Mingled of hope and of death. 
Flowers that bloomed not before 
Mate ere the norther may roar 
And the frost broiders their pall. 


XLV 

We must not doubt each other any more 
Nor longer rack our sympathies with fear 
That other faces may become more dear 
Or that one loves less warmly than before. 

O let us hoard the shreds of our delighting 
And scanty morsels of our meetings here, 
Long absences with burning love requiting, 
With sharp laughs drying each recurrent tear. 

For both alike move onward unsupported ; 
Each has two souls, of which the soul at home 
Directs and plans as ever ; unescorted 


187 


1 88 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

The other far and far away will roam. 

Because the outsoul cleaves a distant air 
We look so pale and wan, and so forgetful stare. 


XLVI 

O cruel stairs and cruel echoing halls 
That will not deaden every step that comes, 

Your careless sound with grievous rumbling falls 
Like beat on my tense heart of noisy drums. 

The step that soothes, the step your hard white walls 
Should yearn to echo, in its cadence sums 
The melody that in the streamlet foams, 

Each free sweet voice that in the wildwood calls. 

That light, light step, will it, O God, arrive ? 

Whilst I, leaned faint within this darkened door 
With anguish as of sunken swimmers strive 

Who see bright lands yet know they have no shore : 
Hopeless are arms that she will never fill, 

For though she came, I would be hopeless still. 


Hush ! through the sounds and through the troubled airs 
I hear the whisper of her clinging gown : 

I know her weight is on the spiral stairs, 

And now I look on her lithe figure down. 


Love Poems of Louts Barnaval 

See with what grace and pride without a frown 
She passes men ; see her beguiling hairs 
Demure of coil, all soft and harmless brown 
Till fine gold daggers stab you unawares. 

And while she rises with her princess mien 
Behold the face wherefrom expressions look 
Like a deep autumn’s daylight, clear, serene, 

A glorious title-page to O, what book ! 

Back, back then cares and in her coming drown — 
My light and love and life, my cross, my crown ! 


XLVII 

A man lay wrecked upon a wizard’s isle 
Thick fringed about with laces of salt foam ; 

At last he rose above the wave’s recoil 
In quest of water round about to roam. 

And lo one spot rewarded languid toil 
Where life revived and where he saw a home, 
For there a fountain reared its fairy dome 
Of liquid crystal free from stain or soil. 

But ere his hot lips touched that heavenly blue 
A woman’s voice, with passionate warning tense, 
Prayed him avoid a thing of shame and rue, 


189 


1 90 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

Nor do, by Love most holy, that offense ! 

The seaworn man made her the bitter vow, 

And when he died the fountain kissed his brow. 

XLVIII 

Are these the arms once glad, now empty woe, 

That held a casket brimmed with spices warm ? 

These arms were moulded, so I surely know, 

To fit the white curves of your glorious form. 

Is half enough ? no, but it shall be so ; 

For I shall do no thinking from this day 
Save that long dreams of our delicious play 
Shall make my life with seeming radiance glow. 

I feel my cheeks with your soft tresses brushed ; 
Between us blooms O, what a wondrous flower 
Red, red, blood red with four red petals crushed 
Close, close in one ! Now that the world lies hushed 

Our wildly tossing hearts in this fierce hour 
Tremble within our breasts like bells that shake a tower. 

XLIX 

How to awaken that within a soul 
Which makes it soul above all intellect, 

How to alarm a conscience yet uncheck’d 
By doubts of sudden and undreamed of goal ! 


Love Poems of Louis Barmaval 19 1 

How to chain up unwavering to its Pole 
A will that veers as caprice may direct 
And with a flood of magnetism affect 
Parts most indifferent and thus fuse the whole ! 

Ah, woe is me, who am a mortal born 
Full of half truths and fickle as the wave ! 

It answers naught to answer scorn for scorn 

Opposing bravery with a face as brave ; 

Behold, with thinking is the night outworn 
How from the flame of hell a brand to save. 


L 

How can you ask that I should kiss its face, 

That lovely clear face of the child we wrong, 

When scarcely hot lips and embraces long, 

By right its father’s, have effaced their trace 
From our vile forms ? Does its sweet, noble grace 
Raise no wild thoughts that hardly should belong 
In head so fair ? Does the fresh childish song 
From your dark soul all hope of pardon chase ? 

I cannot touch that frank bright face of him 
Nor shake in falseness some one’s hand we know, 

I cannot act, for love or like or whim, 


192 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

The caitiffs part and in feigned friendship bow, 

I will not play the hypocrite and brim 
My cup of crime with meanness. I will go. 

LI 

Ay, one may school the passions to a calm 
And call each virtue singly to one’s aid ; 

Forswear all lust and to one’s pulse have said 
Time shall bring poppies and fierce action balm. 
But when it seemed I could withstand your charm 
And my wild blood and feel no more afraid, 

Within your sphere with careless foot I strayed, 
Nor in such coldness could foresee the harm. 

Ah, woe is me for hate that’s worse than luring, 
Your studied cold was hotter far than blame, 

My wicked flame flared in me past enduring 

Though fall I must, and falling blot out your name 
You prayed for grace, I begged for you, adjuring 
High heaven to see our last and crowning shame. 

LII 

Ah, here you stand, and from the photograph 
Gaze out with drooping wrists, a little trace 
Of deprecation on a serious face. 

But not one glint of your outflashing laugh ! 


Love Poevts of Louis Barnaval 193 

About your neck a rosary bears the staff 
Whereon Christ died ; against the bosom lace 
For background rich, the beads are all in place, 
Pleading with gentle gleams in your behalf. 

What can they mean, the rosary and the cross ? 

The entreating look and lips apart to speak, 

The posture of a child that knows of wrong ? 

Have you committed crimes untold by song 
And sins that make you now be bold, now meek, 
Next wild with all the hideous torture of your loss ? 


LIII 

When life was sweet to me beside the flood 
The tawny flood, the wild beast flood that yearns 
To break its bounds and ever watchful churns 
The Mississippi mud — 

While life was new, to priests I went to school, 

A Jesuit school, a happy school that leaves 
Words in the memory, never a thought that grieves 
The cautious father’s rule. 

And well I learned the wondrous Catholic lore, 
That subtle lore, that cheerful lore akin 
With wisdom of the ancients, how to win 
Weal from the temple store, 


9 


194 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

How Christ the builder raised the fane of grace, 

And saints heaped grace, and martyrs grace on high, 
Filling an unseen granary to the sky 
To feed a starving race. 


And I would dream that there might dawn the day, 
The blissful day, the harrowing day wherein 
More than my share I might remit of sin, 

And debts for sinners pay. 

But now, alas, far otherwise I yearn, 

Impiously yearn, unbounded yearn for thee, 

Whose vicar, whose atonement I would be 
For sins that bite and burn. 


LIV 

I love you with a longing of the flesh, 

Is not that sad ? 

I love with stings luxurious and bad 
Which yet along a strangely woven mesh 
Of lofty thoughts, self-sacrifice, restraint 
And crystal ardor clear of earthly taint 


Wind in and out, until the weak soul’s latticed in 
With heavenward flowering sprays bound by the snakes 
of sin. 


Love Poems of Lotus Barnaval i 

I long to mix with you in union wild : 

Is not that mad ? 

I long to be in your soul’s garment clad, 

Yea, from your sweet flesh win a carnal child, 

That in ourselves and in its face we see 
Proof of the everpresent Trinity : 

For I, alas, glow with a love so deep and warm 
I want our double kiss wrought in a breathing form ! 


LV 

I come from the foaming tides of the town 
Up from the waste of humanity, 

I come from your foemen and friends all alone 
To where you are waiting so patiently. 

Here to the wide square hushed as a tomb 
Where there are house-fronts giving no heed, 

Silent, remote, where crimes interbreed, 

I come. 

I come in the backset eddy of tide 

Out from the roaring pool of the mart, 

Here in the shade where you lurk and you bide 

His children just save you from breaking your heart. 

Did you say he was true and loves the warm home ? 
Though I lie, yet my fitful, my maddening embrace, 
Makes you long as before his hearth to disgrace — 

I come. 


196 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

What if you said, ‘ This time is the last, 

Henceforward a life of repentance and rue ! * 

The bar of resistance is broken and passed : 

Too proudly you love to be too proud to sue. 

In the black cup of crime we have touched but the 
scum, 

Let us drink to the lees, let us love without stint ! 
Any crime in your arms ! Let me have but the hint ! 
I come ! 


LVI 

When time, the lovely python, met me in childhood’s 
hour 

He seemed a playmate fit for laugh and sportive race, 

Anon I paused aghast and on his pitiless face 

Gazing would marvel long at his stupendous power. 

Later the childish scales fall from my ’stonished 
eyes. 

Numbered are these my days, I know from now the 
snake 

About my busy feet, till they with palsy shake, 

Slowly and surely nearing, ring on ring shall rise, 

Shall cast each broken limb helpless upon the floor, 

With smooth, grim, slimy head shall closely mouth me 
o’er 

Till the cold livid jaws clinch in my heart’s warm core. 


Love Poems of Lotiis Barnaval 197 


LVII 

The noon is black, so black that scarcely now 
These inky loops with the pale page contrast, 

Yet see, in minding of the glorious past 
The sunlike flower of her white radiance blow ! 

Now is the bare room gladder than the day 
And your deep charms and broken face and pale, 
Quivering like ocean just before the gale, 

Lie ’twixt my arms as that hushed night they lay ! 

Red bridal moths shoot swiftly overhead, 

The kisses come, quick drops on tempest-brink 
While shine your eyes two diamonds in the dark ; 

Heaven and earth into one life-cell shrink 

Which, breathed with too much living, lies as dead 

While round the mad ellipse hurries an unseen spark. 

LVIII 

They tell me I am poisoned in the blood 
And say her touch is noxious : can it be 
That what is crisper to the lip than food, 

Fresher than dewdrops, wholesomer than the sea 
Can harm because above our silly heads 
No priest has waved enchantments ? As a brood 
Of twin blue pigeons in a sunshine flood 
Veering are those her eyes, and as o’er meads 


198 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

Submerged the long wave rolls, now up, now down 
With stately gait the tall and lissom grass, 

So on her way that graceful one will pass 
With rhythmic undulations in her gown. 

How now ? Is this the hell-witch ? Be it even so. 
Whence she has come so blessed, thither I long to go. 

LIX 

The tiger’s covert through a fragrance rare 
Is known to Hindoos, O strange love of mine, 
And rocks wherein the cobra has her lair 
Spice with a deadly smell Brazilian air. 

And so I start upon the threshold thine 
A pure narcotic fragrance to perceive 
As if clear gems were ashes at your shrine, 
Arabian gums and ores from Afric mine. 

And though I longed it had not left me leave. 

So clasped was I with unseen arms of lust 
Within whose sphere no man at hurt may grieve ; 
Blisses unending through its slumber weave. 

And when aside your clinging robe is thrust 
Your eyes are azure censers scattering light — 
Eyes that, when weary, seem in scorn to crust 
A crater over with gray slag and dust . . . 

O body frail, that holds a demon’s might 
To drag my soul to hell’s eternal night ! 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 199 


LX 

A scarab, emblem of the world, 

Gropes underground for many a year, 

The dragon-fly, his love wings furled, 
Haunts the dull ditch a shape of fear. 

From foulness rover-beetles draw 
Ambrosial perfumes ; on the tree 

That suckles musky moths I saw 
The fetid gauze-fly’s dance of glee : 

And cantharids enjoy the leaf 

With sunset-purpled butterfly . . . 

Darling that grants me joy or grief, 

Who dares complain ? Ah, what am I ? 


LXI 

What thoughts are they that crease your scheming brain, 
What the ideals and longings of your heart ? 

How shall I learn when you have moved apart 
And so forearm against the o’erwhelming pain ? 

Must we alternate friend and foe remain 

Till death us part, or join for good — who knows ? 

Only from out life’s dim and tangled skein 
There shapes for some a lovely living rose — 


200 Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 

A thing to fondle, dote upon, adore, 

Clinging and smiling, moving ; speaks, laughs, plays 
And in itself the best of both contains : 

O, let us long, since but this one remains, 

For such a fruit as those great women bore 
Who godlike from the looms of Raphael gaze ! 


LXII 


Do I put trust in spirits, God, and days 

To come with glory ? Yea, and here’s my proof. 
Miracles form the touchstone of his praise 
And miracles hold not from us aloof. 

When in your arms I lie and strongly long 
That our twain flesh be one, ’tis done in part, 

But when in pearly chambers ’neath your heart 
Leaps our own child, O then a mighty song 
Of praise outwells from my most thankful heart 
Since by that miracle stands God confessed. 


LXIII 

Speak to me — tell me — is this all ? 

Can I no closer get to you ? 

Why does an awful terror crawl 

About my heart ? I have been true, 


201 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 

You love me, yet a clammy wall 
Splits the warm unit into two. 

My God, nor constancy nor crime 
Can make us one, while time is time ! 


LXIV 

I will not live if this be all of life, 

I will not live if selfish-making trade 
Fill all my days to full and if, afraid 
Of my, of others’ conscience, I wage strife 
Most cheap, ignoble and with meanness rife 
On them that such things equally degrade ; 

Nor can I live to love one who, no maid, 

Whate’er betide, can never be my wife ! 

Why then delay, since life has lost its smile 
And she I love, being fallen, cannot be 
Divorced henceforth from crawling doubts of guile — 
For, traitor once, why traitor not to me ? 

Then, faint soul, why delay ? ’Tis such a little while 
And we must drink the waves of harsh eternity ! 


LXV 

Let me read you all your mind : 
You would like me best a priest 
Who would listen to the least 
Doubt or sin your brain could find. 


202 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

With what rapture would you then 
Throb dishevelled at my knee ; 

Half you’d make a god of me, 

Half a lover warm as men. 

Heavenly rapture, passionate bliss 
Such as only comes from blending 
Sin and absolution, ending 
Feasts of love with burning kiss ! 

That were something worth your while 
Who are dull to those caresses 
A mere common term expresses — 
Virgin vows you must despoil ! 

For resistance whets you on 
And for utter sacrifice 
You are panting, if at price 
Of a soul the deed is done. 


LXVI 

So ! you have really joined the Mother Church, 
The air’s too bleak for you without the fold, 
Negation’s arid heights are cold, too cold ! 

You are no eagle to disdain a perch. 

Now for the sake of peace your brains are sold 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 203 

Into the keeping of an old confessor 

Who stands ’twixt you and heaven an intercessor, 

His price your bandaged eyes. No more of bold 
Complaints at fate, no doubts of right or wrong, 

His shoulders are so broad, his faith so strong ! 

The fleecy curtains of the heavenly vault 
Bathe all horizons in a cool clear light. 

They roll apart. Then do the yellow-white 
Niagaras of the sun the earth assault, 

At once beginning the eternal fight 
'Twixt light and shade. Here is a merciless glare, 
Darkness the darker for the sun lies there, 

And now we freeze and now we pant outright. 

In which are you ? the sunlight or the shade ? 

I love the temperate glow by thin clouds made. 


LXVII 

O when shall close the dry-rot days of pain 
And stinted love that parches to the marrow, 

O when shall all the raw scars of the harrow 
Be burgeoned o’er by cool and windblown grain ? 
When shall some great, free, winnowing whirlwind 
strain 

The chaff-heap life of all that is not sorrow, 

Till corn no longer smacks of sod and furrow 
And nought save love’s pure bolted bread remain ? 


204 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

Never ; at birth the red stars in our palms 
Engraved the lines and portents of our meeting 
And traced in runes how loving would be cheating 


And how our burns could not be healed by balms : 
We shook with fear and to our heart’s wild beating 
Leapt to embrace through storm-forerunning calms. 


LXVIII 

The dread blow — ah, the worst has come at last ! 
Shadows are heavy, low my head is cast, 

A torrent of lies and lamentations drown 
All space and time. But, when the deepest down, 
Why do I thrill 

At thought of that gold-vested warbler shrill, 

Bathed in May morning sunshine, high o’er the 
swamp ? 

Whilst he stood throbbing, coining his heart in song 
And spurning base things that to earth belong, 

He fixed him in my memory like the lamp 
Raised for sad tossers by the ocean’s brim — 

A star that pricks the cloudy demon’s limb, 

A pledge of this, that liars have not yet marred 
The point of gold on the archangel’s sword. 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 205 


LXIX 

The empty shells wherein the ocean roars 
Its hollow memories of departed storms 
Lie beating with the breakers to and fro 
Not of the seas, rejected of the shores, 

Yet masquerading in their lifelike forms. 

What else do I, for whom this crippling woe 
Has open pried all secret-hiding doors, 

Whose vacant heart no fire or hoping warms, 

Whose cheek shall not with joyous daydreams glow ? 

And now, arrived at those bepraised shores 
Where worldly-wise men prate of banished harms 
I can but sigh and wonder. Think they so ? 

Better smooth words, deceptions, lies ! Make haste, 
Before grim Truth destroys me in this waste. 


LXX 

But was it fair, O woman shrewdly cold, 

To use me one way, nor that way the best, 

Your bosom give to him and close your breast 
To me who by such tinfoil am fine gold ? 

The poet who resigned all you caressed 
With cool two fingers as at times a lute 
Which stands for show must sound for tuning lest 
It turn through lack of being loved a mute. 


20 6 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

But him the coarse who has no sounding string, 
Nor aught to lift him from the stolid beast, 

You likewise pastured as his nature asked. 


Say, was it fair the selfish man should feast 
On all your beauties while your pride so basked 
In that wide fame that came when I deigned sing ? 


LXXI 

O’erwhelmed by grief when I to sleep at last 
And feverish rest relapse there comes a rumbling — 
A clattering, rolling noise of horses stumbling 
With heavy hoofs and sound of wheels turned fast ; 
And then I feel it is an ambulance 
Bearing a dead man to the pitiless slab 
Within the morgue. I hear the morning’s blab : 
Who is he and why did he so ? the glance 


Half pity, half aversion that will meet him ; 
And then an awful horror fills my soul : 
What if that thing be I ? or what, O dread, 


If it be she ! The dreary questions roll 
This way and that across my spell-bound head 
Till sun is here and I with curses greet him. 


Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 2 07 


LXXII 

Through the abatis, the rank wilderness 
And jungle growths that now my path oppress 
What help or way or loophole shall be mine ? 
To right and left and either quarter twine 
The giant creepers cant, hypocrisy, 

False witness, cringing and dishonesty ; 

Want rears a mountain bulk and world’s ill-will 
Spreads its morasses on my footway still. 

Is ’t not enough ? Alas, my limbs are lame 
And pulses sluggish and my wits run tame 
At knowledge damning, bitter, bleak as hell, 
That she is worthless whom I love so well ! 


LXXIII 

Woman I loved, woman for whom there still 
Lingers a fondness born in happier days, 

Well may you sigh, well may your eyeballs fill 
With sorrowful tears. Your pallid face betrays 
The awful truth I fell upon, alas, 

The truth foreshadowed ere it came to pass — 

Of seeming love, dry as the sunburnt grass ! 

You cannot love ! Trembling you know that truth. 

Whilst I lay soft, him you perforce betrayed, 

Yet might that pass. Alas, beyond all sooth 
Was crime of her who to a third pipe played. 


208 Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

Yes, you were false to me, to him, to all, 

Blindly you swayed to each base passion’s call, 

Yet worst of any was your own deep fall. 

O naked one, what anguish ! Magdalen 

Stood high o’er you. For her there’s hope of bliss 
But how with one for whom the noisome den 
Of her own heart with torments aye shall hiss ? 

A hell on earth as terrible and lone, 

A painted sepulchre of hardened stone — 

Within, a living corpse that dare not groan. 

Which was it — vanity, or fleshwarm lust, 

Or thirst for ventures that set on the spur 
To rouse my passions till methought the dust 

Whereon you trod smelled rarer than sweet myrrh ? 
Whate’er it was, yet were you often kind 
And though love was not there, I always mind 
The gifts you gave, the rights that you resigned. 

LXXIV 

My heart’s a place once holy. Doorways blow 
Uncertain to the winds that pipe through heaven. 
No idol stands in alcove, to and fro 
The tarnished curtains gustily are driven, 

All pictures from the hard walls long ago 
Were scraped, and not one friendly form, forgiven, 
Lingers to tell of all the sinners shriven 
And lovely saints who knelt in pious woe. 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 209 

The owl and bat, the nightmoth and the spider 
Are tenants here, at times a spectre steals 
Half real half moonshine o’er the crumbling floor, 

A noisome gibbering spectre, a derider 
Of so much awe as yet the precinct feels. 

It goes, and from the roof drops one stone more. 


LXXV 

In civil war when vultureheaded spite 

So tore men’s spleen that honor fled in fear 
Into a village fount with devilish jeer 
An enemy let fall a mineral bright. 

Bright was the stone and merrily, merrily fell 
With circling flashes toward the hidden ground, 

And when the villagers returned they found 
A sweet soft taste in water from their well. 

But while they praised each in the other’s face 
Looked, starting at the shadows deepening, 

Then was no time despairing hands to wring, 

For each grew rigid on his standingplace. 

Just such a poison with a mocking laugh. 

Fell in the waters of a life unstirred 
And turned them sweet while slaying. Now the bird 
Drinks a sure death that from that spring would quaff. 


2io Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 


LXXVI 

I own my fault, but ah, the pain 
To feel the rough skin binding slow 
About my knees and in my brain 
That phrase beat to and fro ! 


Last night when I so hotly sware, 

Your cool words ‘ O my lover, know 
Your heart is clean or else beware ! ’ 
Fell with an icy blow. 


Smile not so deadly. See, the hide 

Has gripped the arms that used to throw 
Dart against hind ! But I shall bide 
Grovelling in dust and woe. 


Pity me ! Ah, one wave of kind 
Remembrance of our mutual glow ! 

One human look before I’m blind, 

One warm hand’s touch bestow ! 

How fast they creep ! Along the ground 
I roll in hideous, clammy flow. 

Before these lips refuse a sound 
Kiss me — before I go ! 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

LXXVII 

‘ How fair a day ! ’ I heard a passer cry. 

The sun has brimmed up with excess of life 
The pretty eyes of flowret, bird and pool 
That joyously from swamp and orchard peep, 
Has thrilled the elms with happy coo of doves, 
Painted their tops with glory, and has brewed 
Within the sap-cells sparkling wines of health. 
The cedarbirds are rollicking in shade 
And from the woody meads the bobolink 
Must skyward tower to ease his heart of joy. 

But I am downcast, languid, full of dusk, 
Remorses, cries of anger. Wholesomeness 
Or health is not for this poor broken frame 
That trails the feet, until I wonder, listless, 

If men are ever paralyzed by woe. 

Here past the Palisades that eastward look 
Pensive across the Hudson estuary 
A little brook runs by a ruined wall 
That framed a home one century ago. 

Before its gaping portal, empty now 
And basking-place for innocent lithe snakes. 
Drew bridle once the greatest rebel known 
Through all Virginia’s thinly peopled woods. 
See him with martial pomp and etiquette 
Of ceremonious days alight in state, 

Enter, partake of an abundant cheer 


2 1 2 Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 

And speak not till, the wine upon the board, 
Grave Washington addresses host and staff. 

But soon alert, they’re off to yonder ridge 
Whence sea and river craft, the British fleet, 
Manhattan’s earthworks and Manhattan’s town 
Are seen as in a military map. 

Now roofless and of tiles and timber stripped, 
Slowly the siftings of the unrestful air, 

With here and there a mass of silt in spring 
When freshets rise, have filled the basement up. 
Then the wise helpful pinegrove ran its young 
And hardy skirmishers before. The van 
Drew near and every summer strewed a rain 
Of needles to complete with rug of brown 
The tapestry of mullein-dotted wall. 

Ay, think you this a lovers’ trysting-place 
Or camp for families long in cities penned, 

The oblong room with stones of softest gray, 
Floors brown, roof blue, with windy organ-loft 
And green orchestrion of encircling pines ? 

For here will romp the screaming jays, and crows 
In great battalions cawing wheel and rise, 

The partridge drums and flighty woodpeckers 
Here cackling play, and bright-eyed in the dusk 
Half seen, half felt, from tops to coping wall 
The soft-winged squirrels draw their graceful arcs. 

O but I tell you it is all a sham ! 

No beauty’s here, no rest, no quietude. 


21 3 


Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 

A horrible place, that draws me like a charm ! 

Look, on the needles there ! the very spot 
Where stood perchance the good man’s Holland bed, 
Are not the needles browner ? Browner ! Black ! 

Red, blood-red, nay, all scarlet ! O, he knew, 

The stealthy fox I one day caught at gaze 
On just that spot ! And yet thereover slept 
The colonist when home he brought his spouse 
Blooming and rosy at the jests of friends. 

There slumbered sunburnt honesty, there born 
Were sturdy rogues who fought with Washington. 

But such brought blessings. Crime since then has come 
If each year finds the needles with that mark. 

That bloodstain was not there when first I saw 
This ruined home. A clinging cobweb rain 
Filled the whole vale and roused the whippoorwills 
In dripping thickets till the forest rang 
With answering throbs as fast as throats could strain. 
The rain was nature’s protest. It would fain 
Have damped the infernal chemics man compounds 
To slaughter man. Against the crime the birds. 
Ominous nighthaunters with the dreary owl, 

Clamored a shrill dissent. The morning I 
Thought was my last and therefore loved them not 
That filled my final moments with their jar. 

No anger knew my heart, but sympathy 
For that pale man who took his doomful stand 
Where now the mark fades never. Who was I 


214 Love Poems of Louis Bar naval 

To harbor hatred, in whose hand was placed 
A shining something ? I, about to pass 
Beneath the sod, away from sun and cloud ? 

Mine was the fault. And there the wrong’d man stood 
Court, jury, judge and sheriff, all in one. 

I glanced farewell to cloudy heaven and tops 
Of horrorstruck fixed pines, whose every leaf 
Was sharp like ears to catch the sound of death. 

Then, what surprise to feel, instead of fear, 

Delight to know that from yon steady ring 
Aimed at my heart the iron call should clang ! 

Then into memory flashed bright days of yore, 

A thousand in a second, all the hours 
Of quiet rest, of anguish, transport, pain 
Swam swiftly by, and I, spectator moved 
At my own tragedy, was thrilled with awe, 

As if, great actor in the grandest scene, 

I could be audience, actor, scene and all ! 

Next, one long breath of God’s air, one long smile 
At my good friend — slowly, I slqwly turned 
My weapon toward the ground. Fire ! ! My God, 
’twas he, 

Not I who lay there dying ! He, ’twas he ! 

And I, who longed to die — I lived, I lived ! 

O too hard fate, there on the moist brown mat 
He that my hand slew, not my will, writhed, died ! 

But left behind a legacy unasked, 

Signed by his eyes, of horror and contempt — 

The awful look that will not quit my brain ! 


‘Love Poems of Louis Barnaval 215 


LXXVIIT 

How long, O God, to be that captive jinn 
Whom Hassan netted in the briny sea, 

How long be held like him this frame within 
Beneath the wise king’s mark of mastery ? 

O if at once the skeleton fisherman 
Would haul his seine and break the hampering seals, 
What joy to burst from the dull bottle’s span 
And while my soul into the wide void steals, 

Feel the hot limbs asunder fly and merge 
A weary brain with spells of long, vague rest, 

Know in my veins of shade and stream the surge, 

And hurricanes wail and thunder through my breast, 
Until each atom from its comrade blown 
Bides by itself, moveless, a speck alone. 


THE END 

















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